


A Thousand Days

by RhinoHill



Series: Pegasus [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Cats!, Established Relationship, F/M, Healing, More cats!, Romance, Sensuality, samjackshipmas2020
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:07:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 51,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28087491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RhinoHill/pseuds/RhinoHill
Summary: "A thousand days,In a thousand different ways,I will learn to love youBetter than before."Sam and Jack both have deep wounds. So deep they almost kept them apart.But the one thing they're both sure of is that they love each other just about as much as they love the grizzled old rescue cat they share.Despite their fear, they make a pact: to try to be together for a thousand days.One day at a time.Nobody but Daniel, Teal'c and Pegasus the cat knows...A feel-good, healing finale to the angst and drama that was Pegasus II.Because the world deserves softness and love.
Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Carter/Jack O'Neill
Series: Pegasus [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2007430
Comments: 472
Kudos: 150





	1. I wish I was the moon

**Author's Note:**

> I am so grateful to have a co-creator on this journey of a thousand days. 
> 
> @XWingKC is Peg's little helper in the sensual parts of this piece, helping me make sure that the heat sizzling between Jack and Sam is as good as it can be in every way. 
> 
> And of course, all your comments will also help steer them towards hilarity and love. (And towards another cat, I'm pretty sure ;))
> 
> Any plot holes or offence caused is resolutely my own, though.
> 
> Enjoy, and love yourselves, gentle unicorns.  
> xo

_Chimney falls as lovers blaze_

_I thought that I was young_

_Now I've freezing hands_

_And bloodless veins_

_As numb as I've become_

_I'm so tired_

_I wish I was the moon tonight_

_How will you know if you've found me at last?_

_'Cause I'll be the one_

_With my heart in my lap_

_I'm so tired_

_And I wish I was the moon tonight_

_\- Neko Case_

My home is the first stop on Teal’c’s route back from the cabin. The first street lights are just sputtering to life against the growing darkness, a perfect echo of my feelings.

Jack’s hand is warm and sure in mine. Throughout the lingering, sweet day, all along the drive home, he’s not let me go, his fingers always somewhere, on my hip, my shoulder, slotted in the spaces between mine.

As if he knows that his touch holds my darkness at bay.

But the slow beat of passing lampposts, the return to familiar surroundings, presses in on my heart.

I love him. I love him. I love him.

But loving him is the most frightening thing I’ve ever done. Because he sees into my soul. I can’t hide from him the way I hid from Pete, with tight smiles he never deciphered.

I don’t want to hide from Jack. He makes me want to start over, to unpick the threads that tie me shut.

But I’m tired.

I’m so tired.

Hiding may be lonely, but it’s safe.

The centre of my chest feels raw from the violence of the last week’s emotions.

I don’t know if I have the strength to feel this deeply.

When the Jeep crunches into my drive, he reaches for my overnight bag and pops his door open.

By the time we reach the top step, I’m worried Peg’s going to batter the door down with his paws. His meows are hoarse with eagerness.

The second I open the door, he bolts out and dashes himself against our legs, headbutting shins and stepping on feet with the intensity of his hello.

I frown down at our cat.

“Is he usually this excited when you come home?” I ask.

“Hell no,” comes the reply from above my head as I stoop to pick up the gyrating bundle of muscle and fur.

Peg fastens his paws on my shoulder and shoves his head under my chin with such force that my teeth rattle together. His meows dissolve into high pitched purrs as he continues to batter my chin.

Jack’s fond chuckle draws my eyes back to him.

His smile fades. The tip of his finger traces the lines next to my eyes.

“You’re tired.”

Again, he sees straight through me.

I drop my eyes, clamp my teeth over my bottom lip, and nod.

His arm circles my shoulder. I can feel his voice rumbling through it into me.

“Get some rest tonight, okay? I’ll see you at work tomorrow, Carter.”

For a slow second, his lips rest on mine.

“I love you,” he whispers.

His fingers find the spot behind Peg’s damaged ear that he only lets Jack touch, and the cat contorts in ecstasy, twisting to face him.

Jack presses his forehead to the top of the purring head.

“Look after your mom, little buddy,” he rumbles. “She’s more precious than you know.”

Pegasus and I stand on the top step, watching, until Teal’s taillights disappear around the corner.

I’m too drained to think of food.

As quickly as possible, I get ready for bed and slip between the cool sheets with the curtains open.

From the sky, the moon looks down.

A thump and a jiggle of the mattress announce Peg’s arrival. Grateful for his presence, I open my arms and he cradles himself against me, his reassuring purr vibrating against the raw spot at the centre of my chest.

My fingers run down the soft fur on his back.

“Why does it hurt so much to let someone in, Peg?” I say the words I could never speak to a human. “I wish I could just look down on the world like the moon without being in it and feeling this whole mess of pain and hope and exhaustion.”

Peg lets out a deep sigh of contentment and snuggles closer to me, tucking his head into my throat, stretching his body so my fingers can reach more of his fur.

My hand follows the path of his spine over and over, slowing as my heart slows and my breathing settles.

“No, I guess you’re right, Peg. If I was the moon, I wouldn’t be able to hug you. There are good things to this life after all.”


	2. 999

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey, Carter.” I do my best to sound stern. “Listen, sorry to bother, you, but I need to speak to our cat.”
> 
> “Oh, okay. Give me a second and I’ll get him. If he’s not playing video games.”
> 
> She pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is pitched higher, with a small lisp on the s of her words. Makes sense, I guess, I mean, cats have a harelip.
> 
> “Whatsshup, Dad?”
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

I don’t know whether to be grateful or annoyed that meetings and inconsequential decisions over comisary menus and international collaborations keep me from her all day.

Still, by the time I’m able to amble up to her lab in the late afternoon and find it empty, I’m uncertain whether the relief or the sense of loss in my stomach is stronger.

I resist the urge to go again later. She looked so tired last night. Not sleep deprivation tired. I’ve seen her cope with that. She looked drained. And the thought that I could be causing her exhaustion makes me want to steer clear of her until she seeks me out.

But she’s an addiction.

By nine in the evening, I can’t resist the pull of her name on my phone.

I’m up on the viewing deck, and I puff out my cheeks as I give in and type a message.

_\- Hey, Peg. What are you up to on this beautiful November evening?_

I focus my telescope on Saturn and try to count its rings, but give up as soon as I hear my phone respond.

_\- Hey, Dad. Ugh. Mom is SO boring. She’s back to the second round of revisions on that article she was reviewing last week. And she just tells me to go play with my own toys when I try to hunt her pen. PLEASE can you tell her she’s supposed to drop everything and worship me?_

I guffaw at the sky, and type my response.

_\- Hey, little buddy. I’m gonna have to take Mom’s side on this one. I mean, quasi-Kepplerian accretion disks are the bomb. Nobody can blame her for being smitten._

I give up all pretence of looking away while the bouncing dots dance on my phone’s screen.

_\- For a second there, Dad, I thought you were as much of a nerd as she is! But then I scrolled up two messages and saw you had some help in remembering the boring shit she gets excited about, because you texted her about the same article last week ;)_

I have to suppress a snort of mirth.

Texting won’t do this justice. I hit the call button.

“Hey,” she answers on the first ring.

“Hey, Carter.” I do my best to sound stern. “Listen, sorry to bother, you, but I need to speak to our cat.”

“Oh, okay. Give me a second and I’ll get him. If he’s not playing video games.”

She pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is pitched higher, with a small lisp on the s of her words. Makes sense, I guess, I mean, cats have a harelip.

“Whatsshup, Dad?”

“Hey, Peg. Look, I know your mom is the astrophysicist in this relationship, but you can’t make me look stupid in front of her. That’s not fair. And for the record, without quasi-Kepplerian accretion discs, our understanding of space would be seriously hampered.”

“I guess,” she ventures on his behalf, in an admirably pouty tone. “But I bet you’re doing cooler stuff.”

I glance down the ladder at the calendar on my bed that I’ve spent all night drawing up. Ten rows, each with one hundred methodical vertical stripes marked, and a date at the bottom. And the first vertical stripe crossed out.

“Well, Peg, how about I come over to yours tomorrow night and cook dinner for you and Mom, and tell you what I’ve been doing? If she doesn’t have other plans, of course. Else we can do dinner another day.”

There’s a pause on the line.

“Mom says she’d like to have you over tomorrow night,” she says hesitantly.

My heart swells.

“Cool. Okay, Peg. Give her a hug from me. And I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

Despite my resolution to tell her everything, despite the pulsing glow of love in the centre of my chest, I can’t bring myself to tell her what I spent my night doing while she used her formidable mind to further science. To tell her that there are only nine hundred and ninety-nine days left before I can tell the world I love her.


	3. Kissing the sunrise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her smile — THAT smile, the one that makes her drop her head and dimple and glow — brings the butterfly dancer in my stomach storming back on to the stage.
> 
> She’s pursing her lips when she looks up again. 
> 
> I can feel her leaning forward, and then her mouth touches my lips. 
> 
> Slowly, her tongue parts them, slipping in. She moves as gently as morning mist, catching my breath in her smile, inhaling softly against my lips. I’m kissing the sunrise. Helpless, enchanted, I can only follow her lead. The tip of her tongue, the curve of her lip, her sigh, become my universe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for going on this gentle ride with me.
> 
> May your smiles outweigh your frowns today xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

My chest feels lighter when I hear the frantic drumbeat of Peg’s paws rushing to her front door to greet me, accompanied by her gentle laughter.

“Hey, little bud!” I have to crane my head to look down at him over the expanse of brown paper bags filled with food and wine. I don’t usually shop at organic supermarkets, but I’m hoping the extra dollars will add something to the taste. Not to say I’m under pressure, but this needs to be the first of many, many, _many_ dinners.

“Oh, here, let me help you.” Her hands close around one of the three bags I’m clutching against me.

“Uh, Carter. I don’t know if I can let go without causing an avalanche.”

Her blue eyes flash up at me.

“Right. Sorry.”

She smells like sunshine and honey, and I want to drop everything and taste her skin.

My mouth curves into a schoolboy grin of mischievous glee.

“If you wanna help out, you can kiss me,” I offer.

Her smile — _that_ smile, the one that makes her drop her head and dimple and glow — brings the butterfly dancer in my stomach storming back on to the stage.

She’s pursing her lips when she looks up again.

I can feel her leaning forward, and then her mouth touches my lips.

Slowly, her tongue parts them, slipping in. She moves as gently as morning mist, catching my breath in her smile, inhaling softly against my lips. I’m kissing the sunrise. Helpless,enchanted, I can only follow her lead. The tip of her tongue, the curve of her lip, her sigh, become my universe.

My pulse is racing when she pulls away and holds the door open wide so I can lumber through with my load.

My throat is dry. I was thrumming with nervous excitement before I came over, but now I’m flustered as a teenager in love with his tutor.

_One step at a time, Jack. Start by not dropping your shit all over the floor._

Carefully, I set the bags on the kitchen island, focus on taking out the chilled bottle of Chardonnay for us and the smaller novelty bottle of catnip-flavoured water that I couldn’t resist.

I wiggle them in the air.

“May I interest you in a beverage?” I fold at the waist in what I intended to be a butler’s bow, but which just ends up feeling daft.

She has the grace to laugh before she snags the bottle of catnip water and examines the label.

“I don’t even know if he likes catnip. I never thought to check.”

I shrug, glad to have something other than her mouth to concentrate on.

“Well, I always said kids should experiment at home, where I could rescue them if anything went wrong.”

She stills.

Her eyes are soft when she looks at me again.

“Peg’s lucky to have you as a dad,” she says.

“C’mon, Pegasus. Do you want to try a treat?”

It doesn’t take much for him to realise he’s about to get something to stick in his mouth. Our cat contorts himself around her legs as she gets a shallow bowl out of the cupboard and sets it down next to his regular water bowl.

She pours half of the flavoured water into his bowl and stands back to watch.

Peg takes a deep sniff, an exploratory lick, and leopard crawls three paces backwards before turning big, golden eyes with slit-angry pupils on us. His ears flatten against his head. His tail flicks in disgust. His nose twitches and he lets out a sonorous sneeze that leaves a glistening snot trail on the floor.

“Ew, buddy.”

Pegasus swings his entire body to glare accusation at my comment, stalks to the island, jumps up, and shoves his head into the bag containing the bacon for our quiche.

“Okay, I’m with you on picking bacon as your drug of choice, though,” I grudgingly admit.

“Do you think it was the catnip in Daniel’s duck toy that he objected to?”

As she asks the question, her arm comes to rest softly over my hips.

I want to lean into her touch, but something tells me to step with care.

I grin instead,

“Let’s not tell Daniel just yet, shall we?”

When you’re young, you think it’s the big moments you’ll cast your mind back to when you’re dying.

It’s not.

It’s the times you joked and topped up each other’s wine while making quiche together. It’s the smell of sunshine and honey mingling improbably but perfectly with smoky frying bacon. The sensation of her lips on yours while you clasp three paper grocery bags between you.

The night is caught in amber.

I slow down my pulse, place my mind on high alert the way Iwas trained to do when captured. But this time, it’s not a stress response. I want to remember every flicker of her.

So I notice immediately; I feel it in my gut when her conversation slows, when the hand stirring the sizzling bacon hovers between phrases.

When she turns to face me, her sadness hits me like an upper cut.

“Sam, what’s wrong?”

She shakes her head, quick, defensive. Then rounds her shoulders in defeat. Her lips quirk into a wistful smile.

“Nothing. This is lovely.”

I catch her chin with my index finger.

“And?”

She twists away.

“And I’m grateful for every moment.”

My stomach drops into my feet.

“But what?”

Her chest rises and falls with a painful breath.

“Nothing.”

“Sam.”

She wets her lips with her tongue.

“I. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. For you to realise you deserve better.”

The room spins sickeningly around me. Stepping carefully over the tilting floor, I wrap her in my arms.

“Better than what? The most beautiful woman the Air Force has ever enlisted? The kindest person I’ve ever met? The brain that blows up suns to save worlds?”

Her body is tense against me.

“I can be your friend, S—Jack. I’m fine at that. Just…”

Her shoulders sag, a birthday balloon pricked by a malicious toddler’s pin. _I’m so scared that you’ll run out of patience with my problems with sex,_ her words from that moment in the sunrise come back to me.

I reach around her, turn off the heat under the bacon.

“C’mere.” I pull her to a seat at the island, sit down, guide her onto my lap.

“Will you do something for me?” I breathe into the tender curve of her neck. “Will you answer the next question completely honestly, even if the answer isn’t what you think I want to hear?”

After a moment’s hesitation, I feel her head moving up and down.

I take a deep breath.

“Last Thursday. When we made love. Did you enjoy it?”

“Yes,” her breath moves against my skin, too soft even to be called a whisper.

“I did, too. And if you’re okay with it, I’d quite like to do that several hundred more times before we decide what either of us deserves.”

I stroke the silky lengths of her hair, my hand slowing along with my heart.

And a thought floats into my mind. A thought that makes me want to take the dust cover of the wood saw I last used when Charlie was alive.

A scuffling scrape pulls my attention to the stove.

A ginger blob snags a sizzling rasher of bacon in a deft claw and leaps to the floor to eat it.

“Oy! PEG!”


	4. Bee hotel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I suck in an excited breath. “It’s a bee hotel, isn’t it?”  
> He pulls his head back. Both eyebrows shoot up. “A bee hotel? What even is that?”  
> “You know, for when bees venture too far from the hive in search of nectar and have to spend the night.”  
> He tucks his pencil inside the notebook and closes it.  
> “That’s adorable,” he smiles as he places it on his bedside table and switches off the lamp on his side of the bed.  
> “Bee hotels are a real thing!” I protest as I copy his movements and lose him in the sudden darkness. “Okay. Hmm. Is it a Christmas decoration?”  
> His hand finds me in the darkness and pulls me into his embrace.  
> “Closer,” his voice rumbles through me.
> 
> And I realise his jokes have lured me into his arms while keeping me so distracted that I felt no fear at all.  
> His fingers trace a slow path through my hair. His lips rest on my temple.  
> “I love living in a world where people build hotels for tired bees,” he murmurs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For @becpea, who called me Best Author Ever -- something I WILL get printed on a coffee mug to grin at when I'm stuck in awful meetings and would rather be writing, or when I'm staring at the World's Worst Piece Of Writing Ever and would rather be in awful meetings (both of which happen on a daily basis)
> 
> Oh, they also asked me to tell them what happened after dinner. Which made me figure it out.  
> Yes, I love bees.
> 
> xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

I watch him watching me.

I recognise the tells. The hesitation before changing the subject, the gentler humour than he would normally use.

And I want so badly to relax into his reassurance of several hundred more nights.

My grandmother’s face rises in my mind, her eyes always bright with mischief. As if she had outlived anything but mirth.

She always had chocolates in the bowl on the kitchen counter, and she didn’t walk, she danced around her house to the perpetually happy music playing on her old transistor radio.

 _Chase your dreams, kiddo,_ she’d told me when I got my college acceptance, _use that big old brain of yours to save the world. But promise me you won’t be so busy worrying about the future that you forget to enjoy the views on the ride._

I fold my hands around my waist to hold the memory a little longer and stare at the man I always thought I’d have to love from a distance. He’s bent over, checking the slightly-less-bacony-than-planned quiche browning in the oven. Even in the baggy jeans he’s wearing tonight, the curve of his ass is visible. I can imagine the dip above it in the small of his back, one of the most beautiful places on the body to me.

 _Grandma, you would approve of this view,_ I shoot my thought into the sky.

My lips quirk into a grin.

 _And this ride, in fact,_ I add.

“Carter?”

He glances around, worry creased between his eyes, and I realise he’s waiting for an answer to a question I missed in my musing.

“Sorry, what did you ask?” I shake my head to get my thoughts back on the conversation.

He takes in my grin, steps back to lean against the counter and crosses his arms.

“Carter, were you checkin’ me out?”

He sounds so pleased that my smile grows, even as I feel the blush crawling up my cheeks.

“Um. My grandma always told me not to be so busy worrying about about the future that I forgot to enjoy the views on the ride there.”

He nods slowly. “I like gramma already. Tell me more.”

“She never stood still.” I think back to her constant smiling and jiving. “And she listened to the Top 40 religiously. She was more up to date on current music than I was as a teenager.”

“Well, the quiche is in there for another fifteen minutes or so. Whaddaya say we put on some music for gramma and enjoy the ride?”

I don’t usually have music on, but it’s absence is a sudden hole in the mood. And I know just what grandma would have listened to on a night like this.

He follows me to the sitting room where the hifi and the CDs I inherited from her live.

There’s one that conjures her more clearly than any other.

I find Fleetwood Mac’s album Tango in the Night and put it on to play, skipping past the first two tracks to find Everywhere.

As the harp arpeggios give way to the easy rhythm of the guitar, his hands find my waist.

And the future is still a lonely and uncertain place, but right now, nothing feels more right than reaching my arms around his neck and swaying to the beat.

“Jack,” I ask as the song ends, eager to hold on to the moment, “will you stay tonight?”

I know he hears the tremble in my voice, but he only pulls me against him.

“Sure,” his voice rumbles.

But I can’t keep my tension at bay as the evening wears on. I know she meant well, but this ride is terrifying and I wish my grandma hadn’t encouraged me to take it.

I delay everything in the lead-up to getting into bed, locking myself in the bathroom to brush my teeth and remaining fully clothed.

The pit of my stomach is awash with acid.

Twice, I freeze with my hand on the doorknob. _It was fine last week!_ I scold myself. Who am I kidding? It was way better than fine. The things I felt with his mouth on my body still make me close my eyes when I relive them.

But that night I was high on Daniel’s return and the evening at the bar. And the future didn’t lie in front of me then the way it does now.

When I know I can’t wait any longer, I square my shoulders and open the door.

He’s holding a pencil in his long fingers, the bronze of his skin making his white t-shirt glow when he looks up from the notebook he’s writing in.

With a gentle smile, he sets down the notebook on the bed, and rises.

The sight of his sweatpants and t-shirt floods me with relief. It’s a signal.

“I’ll give ya some privacy to change.” And he disappears into the bathroom.

My knees give way. I sit down heavily on the bed. All my panic, and he saw right through me. With his notebook, with his clothes, he’s telling me nothing has to happen. And somehow that makes me less terrified of the possibility of it happening.

It’s a safety net. He's given me a safety net.

By the time he pads back in from the bathroom, my shoulders have unclenched.

He slides into bed next to me and peers at the journal in my hands.

“You read that to fall asleep? Yikes.” He wrinkles his nose.

“I read books too!” I fake indignation.

“Three hundred page manuals for spaceships are hardly better,” he grunts.

“I mean novels.” I dig at him with my elbow. “About alchemists. And other early scientists.”

“Hmff. As long as you only bring novels fishing. Anything with citations and footnotes is going straight in the pond.”

I huff a laugh. “Okay.”

His foot creeps over to touch mine as I read and he returns to his notebook.

The truth is, this article doesn’t stand a chance at keeping my attention, not with the way his hands move in sweeping lines over the page, the way he scrunches one eye closed in a thoughtful pause before writing again.

At an artistic diagonal, it hits me. He’s not writing.

“Jack.” I drop the journal on the bed. “Are you drawing?”

His hand hovers.

“Not drawin’. Just workin’ on a plan.”

When he’s controlling a situation, he finishes every single word. When he’s taunting someone, or relaxing, he drops one final consonant every now and then. But he only drops more than one per phrase when he’s nervous.

I’m desperate to pull the notebook towards me and look. But he’s been so kind about my insecurities. I won’t do that to him.

“May I see?” I askinstead.

“Not much to see.”

He lowers the book slightly, revealing a stylised fir tree on a curved base that reminds me of the clean, bold lines of nineteen fifties furniture. Annotations litter the page, some free standing, some linked to parts of the tree with arrows. The centre of the tree is carved up into dozens of differently shaped rectangles, like windows in a fantasy tree house.

“Bird feeder?” I ask, trying to place the purpose of the piece.

“Nope.”

“Doll house,” I guess again.

“Uh uh.”

I suck in an excited breath. “It’s a bee hotel, isn’t it?”

He pulls his head back. Both eyebrows shoot up. “A bee hotel? What even is that?”

“You know, for when bees venture too far from the hive in search of nectar and have to spend the night.”

He tucks his pencil inside the notebook and closes it.

“That’s adorable,” he smiles as he places it on his bedside table and switches off the lamp on his side of the bed.

“Bee hotels are a real thing!” I protest as I copy his movements and lose him in the sudden darkness. “Okay. Hmm. Is it a Christmas decoration?”

His hand finds me in the darkness and pulls me into his embrace.

“Closer,” his voice rumbles.

And I realise his jokes have lured me into his arms while keeping me so distracted that I felt no fear at all.

His fingers trace a slow path through my hair. His lips rest on my temple.

“I love living in a world where people build hotels for tired bees,” he murmurs.

And I do, too.

I do, too.


	5. Christmas Shopping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’d like to buy about twenty or so small toys for my girlfriend.”  
> My eyes widen.  
> “Twenty?”  
> He raises a toned shoulder. “Give or take.”  
> “You — um — sir, you do know sex toys generally aren’t single use?”
> 
> A genuine grin splits his face.  
> “Yeah. I’d figured. I’m building an advent calendar of sorts for her. And just Jack is fine.”
> 
> Holy shit. The hero of the Romance novel I’m working on has just had his name changed. To Jack. 
> 
> \--oOo--

*Kelsey*

My stomach clenches when the bell rings, signalling a new customer. It’s 9pm on a weekday. The time the lonely perverts have enough whisky in them to drunk-drive to a sex shop and get a hard-on from hitting on the sales assistants.

I grimace as the physique appears through the discreetly tinted door. We may be expensive, but that does not make our clientele classy. And it’s a guy, as expected at this time of night. Which means I get to serve him. Yay.

I hold the image of the creative writing course this job is funding in my mind as I tuck my notebook back under the counter and plaster the smile on my face. The only good thing about working late shift is that the johns are too drunk to care about my insincerity.

“Ya know, you’ll sell twice as much if you just undid one of those buttons and showed some of your sweet cleavage.” Jason leans over and tries to stick his fingers into my shirt.

Useless fucking letch.

I grab his middle finger and bend it backwards just far enough to make his smirk twitch with pain.

“Fuck off, Jace,” I say under my breath as I turn to welcome our customer. “I don’t have to undress to sell shit, because I know how to do my job.”

“Stuck up bitch,” his voice trails behind me as I head towards our customer.

The first thing I notice is his build. He's all muscle. Tight, toned. Work-honed, not gym built.

My eyes travel slowly from his trim waist to his face.

Brown hair tinged with silver. Cut neatly short. No facial hair. A strong chin and a mouth that just threatens to tweak into a smile.

Kind brown eyes that sparkle with amusement at the fact I’m checking him out.

Shit.

“Uh. Welcome to Forbidden Fruit? How can I be of assistance this evening sir?”

What the hell is up with the squeak in my voice, the way the end of every sentence rises into a nervous question?

And what the actual fuck is up with my hand, which is stuck out in front of me to shake his?

What sex shop assistant shakes her john’s hand, for the love of all that is holy?

It’s as if he notices my discomfort though, and acts to diffuse it.

Solemnly, he takes my offered hand.

His mouth lifts into a smile that is half kindness, half relief.

His handshake is strong and decisive.

Damn. It’s almost enough to make me reconsider men.

“Actually, it would be good to get advice from a woman.”

His voice isn’t deep exactly, but it holds such quiet authority that I’m sure he’s CEO of some big business. Though he has to be active to maintain that build. Head firefighter, maybe? Ooh, I can’t wait to get home and tell Akheela about the first actual good looking customer I’ve ever served.

A polite pull on my fingers makes me realise I’ve been hanging on to his hand.

FUCK.

“I’d like to buy about twenty or so small toys for my girlfriend.”

My eyes widen.

“Twenty?”

He raises a toned shoulder. “Give or take.”

“You — um — sir, you do know sex toys generally aren’t single use?”

A genuine grin splits his face.

“Yeah. I’d figured. I’m building an advent calendar of sorts for her. And just Jack is fine.”

Holy shit. The hero of the Romance novel I’m working on has just had his name changed. To Jack.

As long as this Jack is not trying to be Christian Grey. Because that book and anyone who liked its inferior writing craft can fuck right off.

Jack shifts, looking apologetic.

“And I think I need a woman’s help. I need nothing big or painful. Only pleasure.” He shuffles his feet. “For her.”

Oh, no, it’s okay, Jack can stay. I think I’ll make the hero of my book a little older. Silver fox. Commander of a fire station.

God, I can’t wait to tell Akheela!

I turn towards the shelves frequented by women, deliberately leading him by a route that doesn’t expose him to Jason’s lecherous stare or inappropriate comments.

“I’d be happy to tell you what could work, Jack, based on what my girlfriend and I most enjoy.”

I can hear the sigh of relief behind me and imagine his strong shoulders relaxing slightly with the sound.

“Thank you so much,” he says softly.

This man is too good to be true.

Granted, I’m giving him the right cues. The uniform shirt buttoned up to a place that shows no cleavage at all, the deliberate reference to my girlfriend.

Well, okay, I may also have inadvertently sent different signals when he caught me eyeing his muscles and when I shook his hand and forgot to let go…

But still. He’s building her an advent calendar of toys for her pleasure. I’m _so_ stealing that idea. For my book or for my life. Or both.

I come to a halt in front of the display of clitoral stimulators.

An obvious place to start.

“So, what does she enjoy?”

His face drops.

He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“She — we — we’ve been friends a long time, but this is new for us. And. The thing is, she has dyspareunia. It’s a condition that —“

“I know it,” I interrupt him tersely.

Oh no.

I _really_ fucking hope he doesn’t think shoving twenty different sized vibrators up her will magically cure her. If he’s only here to find a way to get his dick wet, he can bloody well deal with Jason.

He sucks in a breath.

“Thank God,” he says. “I didn’t know about it before. I… I want to show her that you can make love in so many ways that don’t involve penetration. I…” he trails off.

Inside his pockets, I see his hands balling into fists.

This man with his understated authority and his filmstar body is doing it for his girlfriend, not for himself. I suddenly find myself wishing he was a friend and not a customer. My life isn’t exactly overrun with good guys.

I nod, before realising he’s looking at the floor and can’t see me.

“It’s okay, I understand,” I say instead. Compassion washes through me, opening my mouth when I would normally keep it shut. “I have it too. And I can give you about a hundred recommendations that I’m sure she’ll love. I’m Kelsey, by the way.”

I pick up a bright pink button and grin at the way he tries to suppress his grimace.

“Maybe something less bright pink? She’s kinda, um, combat boots and physics, not false eyelashes and makeup. Um.” He scans the shelves, picks up a Rubber Duckie. “Um, fun is fine, I think. She likes to laugh. She has a great laugh.”

He just glows when he talks about her. Man, I wish I could film this and watch it the next time I have to deal with an asshole customer, to remind me the good ones exist.

“You’re cute,” I grin as I pop the button back and go for a more discreet powder blue.

Jack looks distinctly as if he’s not used to being called cute, but willing to take it in return for my advice.

Oh, this _will_ be fun. Also, call me soft, but I want to help if it can make a difference to his girlfriend.

“Right, so nothing overly girly. Gotcha. And you’re not too sure what she likes yet. How severe is her dyspareunia? What triggers it? Is it emotional or physical?”

His eyebrows crease.

“What do you mean, emotional or physical? It’s pain on penetration, isn’t it?”

Okay, Kels. Baby steps are needed here.

“Ye-ess, but has she told you if it’s just always been that way, or if it started after a particularly negative sexual encounter?”

His brown eyes darken before he glances away, as if to hide the force of his emotion from me. But a muscle jumps in his jaw, and the Rubber Ducky’s hard plastic box groans in the force of his grip.

His voice is tight with fury when he speaks again.

“She hasn’t said, but I suspect someone did this to her.”

I release a sigh. Even years later, my stomach knots with memories. I don’t blame his girlfriend for not volunteering the information.

“All right. If there’s a chance of it being emotional, we also need to make sure we only do things that keep her in control of you and of the situation, not the other way around. You’re okay with that, I assume.”

I’ve phrased it as a statement, not a question. It’s a challenge. I know it. Not the best way to sell expensive toys. But I already feel for this woman. I’m fucked if I’m going sell her boyfriend anything that will bring back any fear.

I watch him intently, looking for the signs I expect to see: anger at being told how to have sex, frustration at the thought of not being in charge.

I don’t anticipate the way he folds, the look of defeat and sorrow.

He scrubs his hand across his face.

“God, who am I kidding. I’m not good enough. I can’t hurt her, I — sorry. This was a stupid idea.”

I have to grab his arm in a painful grip to stop him running into the night, but I have no trouble making my tone gentle. I mean every word I’m about to say.

“Jack. Trust me. The fact you’re here, asking me, means you are the _only_ one good enough for her. What you’re doing isn’t stupid. It’s lovely. And we can make it fun. We have body paint and sensation play and things that don’t even focus on orgasms or genital stimulation, things that just feel good. We’ll find her twenty four gifts she’ll adore. Okay?”

I’ve had to fetch one of the mega baskets usually only used by corner-store owners buying discounted magazines for resale, by the time we walk his selection to the till to ring it up.

Jason glowers at me while I scan and bag. Jack’s purchase not only made an hour of work enjoyable, but with the amount he’s buying, the bonus for sales assistant of the month is firmly mine.

On impulse, I grab a pen and write my name and number on his receipt.

“In case I can help with any other advice,” I blurt self-consciously.

I can _feel_ Jason taking aim from behind me. I lift my chin against the inevitable sarcastic jibe.

“You turning tricks now, Kels? Not bad for someone who keeps her shirt that buttoned up.”

I swore I wouldn’t react, but a helpless, angry flush spreads up my neck.

Jack’s eyes flick sideways to take Jason in. His left eyebrow, the one with the faint scar, rises.

“Actually, Kelsey was being discreet to avoid embarrassing you. I’m combat trained, you see. And I offered to teach her how to drop you to the floor in pain the next time you say shit like that about her.”

I daren’t turn around, but the way Jack keeps his eyes trained over my right shoulder for three unending seconds before deliberately turning back to me raises a vivid image of him holding Jason’s gaze until the creep behind me capitulated.

“Thanks again for your help, Kelsey.”

His words are unhurried, relaxed, but louder than they need to be for me to hear. He’s aiming them at Jason.

“I think my girlfriend will love everything you recommended. But I’ll be sure to give her your number if she needs more advice.”

I keep my eyes trained on his back as he walks deliberately out, unwilling to face the asswipe behind me.

I don’t care what Jason thinks about me, though. Tonight, I helped a really wonderful man to show his love to his partner. I made a difference.

I’m still staring at the door when my phone beeps in my pocket.

_Thanks again Kelsey_

_If that guy gives you trouble, let me know._

_You may already have the skills to drop him to the ground, but just in case, my girlfriend isn’t much bigger than you and she can take me in hand-to-hand. Pretty sure she’d love to show you a few moves._

_Jack._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although this is part of a bigger story, it was written for #SamJackShipmas2020, with the prompt Christmas Shopping.
> 
> @XWingKC pulled this chapter into shape for me. Thank you, you wonderful human!
> 
> Oh, and in case you're wondering, Kelsey will turn up again in future chapters. And so will her toys.  
> At least twenty chapters of fun await!  
> xo


	6. Blip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I love the man, but I respect the leader.
> 
> I should have known better than to try work my way around the rules. General Jack O’Neill likes to joke about how his job involves nothing but picking the variety of potato to be served in the commissary, but we all know the truth. Not a single worker, contractor or cadet walks these halls without him knowing their face and assessing their potential. And not a movement takes place in the control room that he doesn’t see.
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

I try to tell myself that my apprehension about Thanksgiving at my brother’s house is only regular dread at his understandably ignorant comments about my job and Dad’s assignment, or discomfort because I’ve spent so many of the past eight years off-world at Thanksgiving that I’ve lost the habit of big meals and family quarrels.

But the truth is Mark introduced me to Pete. They work together. They’re friends.

The thing that is actually making my breath stick just below my collarbones is the fear of Mark inviting Pete for Thanksgiving dinner, to try to get us back together.

The fear is enough to drive me out of my lab and into the control room to peer at the other teams’ scheduled missions. Technically, checking other teams’ rosters is above my clearance, but Walter — well, all it takes is a smile. It’s because he likes to feel part of the team, I think. Many of the other ranking officers have a chip on their shoulder about maintaining professional distance, whereas Daniel and Teal’c and I have always just been us.

All the same, a little pang of guilt flicks blood into my cheeks as I murmur thanks and access the file on his computer.

I scroll and tab and refresh in case I missed something, but the first planned engagement is after the weekend.

Shit. I was really hoping to offer to take someone with a family’s place.

“Carter, everything all right?”

My shoulders jerk when I hear his voice, flushing crimson.

“Yes, Sir.” I reply, having to resist the urge to bounce up and salute. I should have known better than to try work my way around the rules. General Jack O’Neill likes to joke about how his job involves nothing but picking the variety of potato to be served in the commissary, but we all know the truth. Not a single worker, contractor or cadet walks these halls without him knowing their face and assessing their potential. And not a movement takes place in the control room that he doesn’t see.

I love the man, but I respect the leader. And that respect leads me to be honest. To leave the mission schedule up on the screen rather than trying to hide it.

“I just thought. Well, it’s been a long year for many people. I… I thought maybe I could help another person by taking their place on a mission, Sir. They may have a family on earth that they want to spend time with.”

He deserves my honesty. I’m glad I didn’t try to hide the truth from him.

But I can’t bring myself to raise my eyes from my lap. Not before he starts speaking, and a hundred times less once I hear the gentle care behind his words.

“Daniel’s shenanigans saved the world, Carter, with a little help from you and Walter here. You deserve the Thanksgiving weekend off. We all do.”

“Yes, Sir.” I know I should thank him as I stumble up from the chair and back to my lab. For being the kind of commander who takes his people’s lives into consideration. For overlooking my breach of protocol. But I don’t trust my voice.

For fruitless hours, I trudge through the report I’m writing on the anomaly that froze everything and uncoupled the gate on the day Daniel returned. The writing is awful, the science is sloppy; I’m going to have to redo the whole thing. Yet if I don’t keep my fingers moving over the keys, the acid swirling in my stomach is going to rise up and choke me.

“Carter,?”

I look up with a tense smile when the General pushes through the door.

“Sir?” I know he hates it, but I can’t stop myself standing when he enters the room, to show my respect.

“Sam, what’s going on? I thought you were going to Mark’s for Thanksgiving?”

It’s not the General. It’s Jack who’s come to my lab to check on me.

“I am.”

I attempt a brave smile.

He steps closer to my desk, close enough that he can speak in barely more than a whisper, near enough that he can hide his lips from the camera in the corner.

“What’s wrong?” He asks.

His hand comes to rest the edge of the desk an inch from mine.

And again, I know that keeping the truth from him is futile.

“Mark introduced me to Pete,” I sigh. “They’re not just colleagues. They’re friends.”

His hand twitches.

“And you’re worried he’ll spend the whole weekend telling you you were wrong to dump him.”

I shake my head. I can handle Mark. It’s Pete I worry about.

I glance up, seeking reassurance, needing to draw on his quiet calm for the fear I’m about to voice aloud.

“I’m scared he’ll invite Pete over to try to get us back together.”

Thunder gathers in his eyes, black and ominous. His jaw hardens.

“Gimme a minute,” he breathes as he whirls and stamps away, leaving my stomach to a rising tide of bile.

I’m still staring at the open door fifteen minutes later when my extension rings. The control room’s code flashes on the telephone screen.

“Carter,” I answer, grateful to have something else to focus on for a moment.

“Uh, Colonel, General O’Neill has asked for you to join us in the control room. There’s an anomaly in the system.”

Walter’s voice is relaxed enough that I know I don’t need to panic and run, but I run anyway, my feet chasing my nerves down the corridor.

They’re both bent over a waveform on the screen when I burst in.

“Yep, that’s definitely more than a blip,” the General observes sagely, pointing to a disturbance so subtle it would normally make him question my eyesight if I pointed it out.

“Carter, what do you make of this? It looks like some kind of power surge. Happened right around the time I unplugged my printer.”

“Sir?”

He leans forward, his eye boring into mine so intensely that Walter leans back in his chair to stay out of the line of fire.

“That’s an anomaly in the gate’s energy signature. Isn’t it? Like a, a _thing_. Just because I unplugged a printer. That shouldn’t happen, should it?”

Walter swivels his head from the General to me.

“Well, actually, sir, uh, I mean, it could just be the load adjustment.”

“Could be, but what if it isn’t? I mean what if every time I print something, or plug something in, the gate blips? What if it blips the next time someone dials in with an emergency? I dunno, Carter. I don’t trust this. Maybe we should check the gate programming, you know, top to bottom. At a time when it’s unlikely to be used.”

Walter’s head turns back to the commanding officer leaning on his desk. With the lights glinting off his bald scalp, he looks for all the world like a spectator at a futuristic tennis match.

And I’m so glad he’s looking away, because the thankful smile spreads across my face and into my eyes before I can shut it down.

“I can cancel my plans and do it this weekend, Sir,” I offer quietly. “My brother will understand.”

The General I respect, the man I love, sighs deeply and hangs his head.

“I’m sorry, Colonel. I had hoped we would all be able to take the weekend off. But I appreciate you being willing to stay and help. I’d rather not take chances.”


	7. Commander

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her whiteboard is filled with what I can recognise as gate-related equations, but other than the fact they weren’t there this morning, I can decipher nothing. I can read her body, though. The way her chin juts out a fraction more than usual, the extra crease around her mouth that threatens to pull down, rather than up into a smile. 
> 
> The way her eyes won’t meet mine.
> 
> And the acid in my stomach gets a name. I’m scared that she resents my protection earlier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of angst wrapped around a love letter to Commander Jack.
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

The afternoon passes in a drudgery of debriefings and signatures. One advantage of being base commander, one that I promised myself I would use to the maximum, is being able to let my people live a life that approaches normal when the world isn’t actually in danger.

That means no routine missions over Thanksgiving weekend, Christmas, New Year, or the 4th of July. So far, the end of the world has been a fucking pain in my ass for every other holiday, but we’re gonna manage it for Thanksgiving.

I don’t have a family to spend it with anymore, but most of my people do.

And I can give them that.

The ball-ache of giving virtually the entire base a five days weekend, of course, is the loose ends that everyone wants to tie up before they leave. It’s seven pm before I have a chance to breathe.

The first thing I do is to check the on-base logs.

She’s still here. If she doesn’t leave now, she’ll miss Peg’s feeding time.

Not that he can’t wait. That’s not it at all. The fur ball is a walking garbage disposal unit with an indulgent dad. He has extra padding. But her not being with him, not being home, when for once she really has nothing pressing to work on, is not right.

I’m walking the echoing, empty corridor to her lab before I realise what I’m doing.

Her door is closed, and for a brief moment, hope flickers. Maybe she’s unwinding in the base gym before heading home. Perhaps she was on her way out even as I checked the base logs and we missed each other. There’s a possibility the squelch of worry in my stomach is just indigestion.

But I knock anyway. And I’m not surprised when I hear her soft, resigned “come” from inside.

Her whiteboard is filled with what I can recognise as gate-related equations, but other than the fact they weren’t there this morning, I can decipher nothing. I can read her body, though. The way her chin juts out a fraction more than usual, the extra crease around her mouth that threatens to pull down, rather than up into a smile.

The way her eyes won’t meet mine.

And the acid in my stomach gets a name. I’m scared that she resents my protection earlier.

The thought of her having to be near Pete again, the flat note in her voice that comes when she clamps down something she’s too terrified of to mention — they spurred me into unthinking action.

And I can’t bear for her to resent my presence. Sara did. And I ran.

“I know I’m making ya work on Thanksgiving, Carter, but the gate diagnostic is not the end of the world.”

_Please hear my joke, Sam._

“You’re allowed to be home with your cat like normal humans, you know.”

Whether she caught it or not, my weak attempt at humour does nothing to loosen the knot in her shoulders that I long to untangle.

“I need to make this gate diagnostic into an overhaul that counts, Sir,” she answers flatly, barely glancing at my feet before returning to the whiteboard.

_Sam, stop!_ I want to shout. I want to pull her into my embrace and hold her until her breathing deepens and she hears me.

But, whether by coincidence or design, her whiteboard is in full view of the overhead camera. If I face the board it won’t read my lips. But I can’t touch her. Not here.

So, instead of showing love, I joke.

“Okay, I know you’re the brains in this operation, but even I figured out that that tiny blip was just because I unplugged my printer mid-page and plugged it back in before the cache cleared.”

Her shoulders twitch.

“So I made you waste government money because I don’t want to see my ex.”

My heart plunges into my shoes.

“What? No. Carter. This isn’t a waste of money. Look, we both know this diagnostic has to be done once a year, at least. It’s probably prudent to do it now rather than after Christmas, considering whatever the hell froze everything last week. It’s a good move. And maybe this way we’ll both get some time off after Christmas.”

She’s silent for so long I wonder if she’s lost herself in one of the multi-line calculations in front of her.

“You didn’t do it because it was prudent.”

Her voice is so soft I have to lean in to hear it. She’s hissing through clenched teeth, but not in anger. In shame.

“You did it because I was too weak to face my own life, and I ran to you.”

She takes in a shuddering breath, but an avalanche of words pours out before I can interrupt the painful flow.

“You keep saying you don’t want to damage my career. But what about yours? I respect you more than any commanding office I’ve ever served under. You make the right call. Every time. Even when everything in me screams that it’s wrong. You see further, with more courage, than anyone I know. And I undermined that today. I ran to you because I’m weak and you’re strong, and I made you choose my fear over what is right.”

Her head moves from side to side, and a glistening drop lands on her tightly folded arms.

But when I reach for her, she steps away. She, too, knows about the camera.

My whole being screams with the need to hold her, to whisper of her strength, to coax her smile out of hiding.

All I can offer is my voice.

“Colonel, listen to me. When I took the job as base commander, it wasn’t for the thrill of choosing the variety of potato served for lunch. It was because I care about keeping my people safe. Today, I became aware of a potentially dangerous situation facing one of the most valued minds on my base. I didn’t make the call to keep you away from it because I’m your lover. I made it because I’m your commander.”

Her head sags forward under my words, and I know, as she does, that the camera would see the tears falling if she turned to face me now.

She’s been through enough. She deserves her dignity.

Slowly, so as not to startle her, I reach up and rest my hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll give you space. I’ll check in on Peg and feed him. I’m heading out now.”

Her nod is so small I may have missed it if I didn’t feel the movement through her tense shoulders.

“Yes, sir,” is her quiet response.

—oOo—

Peg thunders his welcome at me when I open her front door, as he does every time. And his exuberance should lift my mood, but it only cuts the anger at everyone who made her feel less than she is deeper into my soul.

I crouch down, pick him up, and bury my head in the soft fur of his neck.

“Why would anyone hurt someone as fierce and kind and beautiful as her, Peg?” I breathe into his warm, purring body. “Why do children die and people like that survive?”

Peg’s squirming ceases. He nuzzles his nose into my neck and relaxes into my desperate hug.

And against his solid warmth, my heart finally settles enough to let the black veil lift a fraction.

We spend the night on the couch, the TV on for background company, while he meticulously grooms his butt and I finalise the arrangement of the drawers in the advent calendar, shaped like a tree, that I’ll spend the weekend making for her. It’s going to be big, almost three feet high, but I like the form, the way it echoes both a Christmas tree and a glider in flight.

I’ve bought all the wood I need, and the woodcutter in my garage is uncovered for the first time in ten years. I smile to myself as Peg shares a bit of my pork chow mein. I’d better build her a bee hotel from the cut-offs, too. Her eyes just lit up when she spoke about it.

When I wake up after midnight, the TV is still on and the cashew nut shrimp I ordered for her is untouched on the kitchen counter.

With a hollow chest, I put her food in the oven, leave a note on the counter and switch off the lights before heading home.


	8. Our dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What’s wrong?” She asks as she traces the lines of fear around my eyes.  
> And I recognise our dance.  
> We’re so much better at loving each other than ourselves.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To quote @Gwhite, two steps forward, one step back.
> 
> But the step Sam takes towards Jack today is a big one.
> 
> Merry Christmas, unicorns.  
> I hope you have someone, somewhere, who can love you when you find it hard to love yourself.  
> xo

*Jack*

Thanksgiving morning dawns cold and bright, with a sky that threatens snow. As I make my coffee and check the paper, I wonder if Peg would enjoy romping through the snow or if he’d hate the cold underpaw. My hand reaches for my phone to call and ask her what she thinks. But I told her I would give her space. If I can’t even do that, she has no reason to trust me with the rest of her heart.

Thank goodness I have her advent tree to keep me occupied.

I work slowly, building joints that look beautiful rather than just being functional, letting the shades and grains play against each other. I have green, red and brown wood stain ready, but I’m beginning to toy with the idea of leaving the wood to speak in its own colour.

When my phone buzzes in my pocket and I see the control room’s number scrolling across the screen, the immediate and ever-present sinking in the pit of my stomach is offset by a spark. It could be her, just calling to say hi.

“O’Neill,” I keep things simple in case the world is gonna end again.

My mouth draws upwards when I hear her voice, though, and my grin grows further when I spot the excitement in her tone.

“Sir, there’s a glitch in the gate!”

I set down the length of wood I’ve been sanding and cross my legs, leaning back against the work bench,

“You know, Carter, most earth humans don’t get excited when they find a problem.”

In the distance, I can hear Walter’s suppressed guffaw.

“Yes, Sir. No — Sir I mean it wasn’t your printer. Well, it was, but the blip shouldn’t be there. It’s a back door.”

A little red bell in the back of my brain starts ringing insistent warning.

“That’s not…good. Carter.”

I can hear the sun rising in her voice.

“No, Sir. But now that we’ve found it, we can fix it. I think I found a way to even trace anything that tries to attack us through the back door after we’ve shut it.”

She pauses, and her voice is softer when she speaks again.

“And we only found it because of your blip.”

That’s as close to reconciliation as she can come with Walter in the room, and my soaring heart knows it.

“Well, can ya grab a cup of coffee and wait till I get there before you fix it? I don’t want you and Walter to have all the fun without me.”

—oOo—

Only her legs are sticking out from under the gate ramp when I stride into the control room.

With a quick nod to Walter, I grab his intercom to the gate room.

“Hey!” I imitate my best petulant whine, working hard to keep the grin out of my voice. “I thought you weren’t gonna have all the fun without me!”

She scoots out, flushed, holding a gadget and a tablet and an almighty smile that weakens my knees. There’s the most — _the most —_ adorable smudge of grease over her left cheekbone.

Fuck, I love her.

“No, sir! I was just setting this up so you can see the problem and a simulation of our fix.”

At the word ‘our’ Walter rises about an inch into the air. Which is like 20% of his total height. I lift my eyebrows at his proud smile.

“Um. Do you want to come have a look? I mean, we obviously didn’t do anything without your approval…” a slight flush spreads from the neck of her fitted black T along her throat.

God, it’s hard to keep a straight face.

I pinch my lips together to stifle my laughter.

“Obviously,” I comment drily before sauntering towards her.

She’s right. Of course she’s right. The fact is, any quick power fluctuation near the gate does cause a minuscule surge, and though you’d have to know your shit to do it, a malicious force can force a fluctuation from outside the base, then lock on to it and use it to stop the gate from shutting down.

And rather than just isolating the gate’s circuits better, which would have been my fix, she’s found a way to shake hands with the thing causing the fluctuation so we can pinpoint it’s origin.

Even cooler, her new subroutine could be used as a sort of answerphone service for anyone who tries to dial us while our gate is already active, so we can call them right back when our wormhole is disengaged.

I let out an impressed breath when she’s done explaining.

“That’s a good day’s work, Colonel,” I say softly.

“Walter helped, Sir,” she flashes a smile at him and I can see his chest expanding even more. “And you’re the one who found the flaw.”

She pauses, wets her lips.

“So, are you happy for us to go ahead and implement?”

“Wait. Is there a risk you forgot to tell me about?” I frown. It seems really straight forward.

“No, Sir. Not that I can tell.”

“Well then, what are ya waiting for, Carter? Build us a mole flusher answering machine thingy!”

She bounces to her feet, grinning, and heads to the door.

“Whoa, gate’s in here!”

I managed it. I took two days, but a giggle finally slips out before she clears her throat and purses her lips.

“I need to get the components from my lab.”

“Right. I’ll walk ya.” I scramble to my feet, wiping my hands on my jeans. “Walter,” I greet him as I head towards the door, and her.

Our steps fall into the same rhythm, as they have for eight years now. We walk the first minute in companionable silence.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt your Thanksgiving,” she offers while we wait for the lift doors to open.

“Nah. I was just puttering in the garage. Working on that bee hotel of yours.”

It’s not a complete lie. I have been setting aside the pieces that would build her tree in miniature.

The way her eyes flash from gentle grey to violet blue, takes my breath away.

“I was gonna take some Thanksgiving dinner over to Peg later, though. Let him experience it first-hand. If you’re done here by then, I’ve got enough for you, too.”

She manages an almost disapproving look.

“He’s going to get fat if you keep feeding him human food.”

“Yeah, well in that case you’d better be home in time to have some and stop us eating it all! Besides, you deserve some pie after, ya know, saving the world. Again.”

The elevator doors slide open and two airmen step in.

“Well, this is me,” she says redundantly when it stops again at the level of her lab.

“Later, Carter,” I murmur before Diaz and Rafferty drown me in talk about Thanksgiving dinner with their families, all the way to the surface.

At six pm, I gather our food and the bottle of wine. At the last minute, I duck into the garage and grab a few squat rectangular waste ends of wood and my whittling knife. It’s been years, but a bee is a pretty easy thing to carve. It could perch on the roof of the hotel.

The oven is wafting the smell of turkey and pumpkin through the house, and there’s a drift ofwood shavings around my feet, when I hear her key in the door.

The sound of our cat rushing to meet her, of her keys jingling into the basket on the hall table, freeze me in place.

This moment is everything I never thought I’d have again. Everything I never felt I would deserve again. Everything that makes me not a soldier, but a man.

And suddenly it’s too big for me to hold.

Her greeting to Peg and his frantic meows die away, replaced by quiet footsteps.

“Jack?” Her voice is concerned.

“Is—.” My words stick in my throat. I clear it roughly. “Is it okay that I’m here? I can go.”

Her smile is a silhouette against the hall light, her legs black against the lamp shining on the half-finished carving in my hands, as she steps closer.

“You did warn me to expect you, when you threatened to make my cat obese if I wasn’t home by dinner. Jack! Are you carving?”

The wonder in her voice snaps me back to the day I handed Charlie the little zoo I’d carved him while away on an interminable mission. He was six. Old enough to recognise the lion and the giraffe, though the walrus needed some help. It was the dog that brought the awe to his face though, with the little ring of wood representing a collar and the minuscule tag with BUD cut into it in barely legible gashes. Charlie’s chosen name for the dog he’d been begging us for.

Sara had been livid.

Charlie got his dog the next weekend.

Her hand folds around the half a bee in my left hand. Gentle fingers pry the knife out of my right. She steps into the path of the light as she bends to lay them down on the coffee table, and then her hand is on my cheek, her lips soft on mine.

“What’s wrong?” She asks as she traces the lines of fear around my eyes.

And I recognise our dance.

We’re so much better at loving each other than ourselves.

My head drops into her palm, I turn and press my lips into the warm skin.

“Nothing’s wrong. I’ve, just. Dreamed about you coming home to me. For a long time.”

Peg loves turkey even more than bacon, it turns out.

And I love the glow of belonging that blankets us too much to want the evening to end. So we sit, with legs grazing, while we speculate idly about the old girlfriend Daniel’s gone to visit this weekend, and the girl Teal’c insists is just a friend but is spending Thanksgiving with anyway.

There is something snagging at the joy in my chest though. Something that’s cut at me since yesterday and that Monte let go until I get it out into the open.

“Sam.” I take her hand. “We don’t have to talk about it. But I need to say it. About what you said yesterday. You’re not tooweak to face your own life. I know Pete wasn’t as stupid and harmless as other people thought he was. Not wanting to face him today wasn’t weakness.”

Her mouth shifts into a bitter line.

“It wasn’t Pete.” She says, her voice lifeless.

Slowly, she backs away from me, retreating to the other edge of the couch, her knees pulledup in front of her as shield.

I know her better than to reach for her now.

“It was Jonas. He told me I’d sleep my way to the top of my career because I was too weak to face my life.”

The pit of my stomach drops into blackness.

“Jonas? Hanson?”

Her arms fold around her ankles.

My heart screams to hold her, but I know this is the one time I can’t touch her without consent. Not when the mere mention of his name made her cower.

My brain roars at me to smooth this over with an awful joke and ease her pain. But clearer than the sear of rage is the knowledge that she trusted me enough to let me in tonight. And that I have to live up to the honesty she has given me by not shying away from this conversation.

I unclench my hands from the fists they’ve formed.

“Sam, can I hold you?”

With a nod, she crawls into my waiting arms, tucks her head against my chest.

I stroke her hair, follow the curve of her back. I wish I didn’t have to match her openness with more questions.

“Was Jonas the one who hit you?”

She stiffens, and I anticipate her running. Yet she stays.

“What did you hear?” Her breath is fever-hot against my shirt.

I shake my head, force my hand to continue the slow circles it’s painting on her back.

“I’ve heard nothing. But last weekend, in the cabin, when I lost my temper. You flinched when I touched you.” I can’t stifle the sigh that tears out of me. “We’ve disagreed before. You never flinched when you were fighting with your C.O.”

She holds her breath for almost half a minute before she answers in a tumble of words.

“He. Only when I made him really angry. I bruise too easily.”

Shit. I’m not qualified to deal with this. I know how to hunt Hanson down and kill him. But I don’t know how to undo what he did to her.

From a lifetime ago, the questions the therapist asked me after Charlie float back, and I grasp at them fro guidance. She’d asked questions, always open, never judging. Tried to keep us talking.

It had helped Sara.

I didn’t want to be helped. Didn’t feel I deserved my pain to be eased. So I’d analysed her instead, found patterns in her words.

Sam’s words burn in my ears. _Only when I made him really angry._ She still blames herself for what happened. Just like me.

Maybe the help I didn’t want ten years ago can be useful now, after all.

And so, I draw a breath, and slow my murderous heart, and choose my words.

“How long were you with him?” I ask.

“Six years,” she sighs. “We met when I was seventeen. He was the first person I loved. I felt too young for boyfriends before.”

She shrugs defeat in the circle of my arms.

“I was still too young. But I desperately wanted not to be.”

She falls silent again.

“And you were engaged for…?” I prompt.

“A little over a year. It was his graduation gift to me. It wasn’t bad before then. I mean I had no experience. He knew that. But once we got engaged he expected me to grow up. I don’t blame him for wanting that.”

“Sam!” It’s out before I can stop myself. And I can feel her tensing. I fucked up.

Her voice draws me back to her.

“I’m frustrating to be with, Jack. My head runs away with me, and I freeze, or I panic. And I know you say it doesn’t matter, but I — it even annoyed Pete eventually. And I love you, and I’m so grateful that you’re willing to put up with me. I just. Please know I won’t blame you.”

She sags against me. And I don’t know what questions to ask her anymore. I don’t know how to be her therapist.

All I know is the dance of loving her when she doesn’t love herself.

I ease my hand up her back, trace the delicate curve of her neck. I run my fingers through the soft silk of her hair while I try to put my heart into words.

“Sam, imagine you worked at Peg’s shelter and not at the SGC. Imagine you were surrounded, every day, by animals thrown away, or hurt, by the people who should have loved them. Imagine you see all that suffering every day and you turn vegan, because you can’t bear to think of another animal being stuck in a cage or killed simply for your food.

She’s quiet against me, listening. I push through.

“Imagine we start dating, and you tell me of your reasons for eating the way you do. The way I see it, I have two choices if I want to be with you. I can insist on eating meat in front of you, even though I know it hurts you, just because I’m too selfish and lazy to change my habits. Which would be kind of a dick move, don’t ya think? Or I can choose to get excited about trying new tastes with you, because I love you. And, I mean. Vegans hardly starve. There are recipe books and restaurants and all sorts of shit I can try.”

The noise she makes sounds like a laugh, but I feel moisture soaking through my shirt.

“You make it sound so simple.” Her voice is muffled.

I shrug, knowing she can feel the movement. And I don’t need to plan my response. It comes straight from the small yellow spark of certainty that I feel whenever I look at her.

“Well, it is simple. And kinda exciting, if I’m honest.” I think of the giant bag of toys and lingerie waiting in my garage, and my skin tingles.

Her arms reach around me.

She holds me as her breathing calms and her tears slow.


	9. Happy Thanksgiving, Dad.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re looking good, Sam. I must confess, I had my reservations. About Pete. But you seem really happy.”  
> Blood chases up my neck and across my face.  
> “Oh, Dad! Um. I’m. That’s over.”  
> “Oh, thank God.” He sighs. “No wonder you’re looking better.”
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Unicorns, as you know, I like to be a little canon divergent. And I love me a bit of Jacob. So he had to be around. At least for long enough to cause some seriously embarrassing moments for his daughter and the new man in her life...
> 
> I hope you enjoy my take on Jacob.  
> xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

Last night, in his arms, something shook loose.

I’m a scientist.

I’m a scientist, not a chef, yet I never understood what he meant until he turned his promise into a recipe. _I can choose to get excited about trying new tastes with you, because I love you,_ he had said.

Sharing my couch wasn’t comfortable. And a part of my brain rebelled — loudly — at the fact that there were unwashed dishes in the kitchen.

But his words seeped into my skin, settling slowly, like Spring rain.

I believed him.

And in the fallow space below my heart, a green shoot started reaching for the sun.

I didn’t want to harm it by moving. So I drifted in and out of dreams until Peg announced six am with a head-butt and a happy meow to remind us of his breakfast time.

Lack of sleep left fuzz behind my eyes, but my heart felt softer than it had for years.

Jack wandered into the kitchen when the coffee was ready, and I felt no hesitation in kissing him, in tangling my fingers through his while we sipped the hot liquid with its swirl of cream.

I’ve been at the base for five hours. The new subroutine is almost ready to test. And still the feeling hasn’t let me go.

He really meant it when he said he could be excited about trying new things. And for the first time in twenty years, I feel the same.

Humming, I dial his number from the control room.

“O’Neill,” comes his habitual greeting after only two rings.

Today, I don’t duck my face to hide my smile from Walter.

“Sir, we’re half an hour from a test run.”

“Good job, Carter. I’m on my way in.”

Idly, I wonder how far he’s gotten with the bee hotel. I want what I’m thinking for tonight to happen at my house, but maybe tomorrow — if this works, then maybe tomorrow we can spend the day at his house and I can see his woodworking station.

Butterflies race around my brain, making my hand tremble as I replace the handset in its cradle.

Walter and I are having coffee by the time he strides in.

While he scrutinises the trials we’ve run to pinpoint the origin of an energy fluctuation within and around the base, I let my eyes drift to the muscles of his forearm, imagining them gliding slowly along a naked piece of wood as he sands off the sharp edges.

He looks up, catching my eyes on him, making me babble to cover up my flush.

“I’ve programmed it to flag any new source of interference, or any source with a change in activity patterns.” I point him to the colour-coded alert levels on Walter’s monitor. “All we need to check now is the off-world activation capture while the gate’s active.”

Maybe it’s because of the eerie sense of calm that his words last night brought me, but it seems as if he’s also less guarded around us today.

He smiles at me.

“I know we could ask Alpha site to dial us, but how about we ping the Tok’ra first? P’raps you can say hi to your dad.”

And I find myself nodding and sliding closer to his warm presence as the chevrons light up and the event horizon appears.

It’s early in the morning on the Tok’ra home world, but it only takes the gate operator a minute to track dad down and hail him to their gate.

“Sam? Everything all right? Oh, hey General.” My dad is still pulling a jacket on as he comes into focus on the screen.

“Hi Dad. Don’t worry, everything is fine. We’re just testing a new patch on our gate system and General O’Neill suggested we see if you’re available, so I could wish you a Happy Thanksgiving at the same time.”

A frown creases between my dad’s eyes. For a second, it looks as if he’s trying to remember something, or fighting a headache, or talking to Selmak. Then his gaze clears and his smile broadens.

“Really. Nothing is about to blow up? No rescue mission needed?”

“No, Sir,” Jack breaks in. “Carter’s just found a pretty cool way to track uncompleted off-world activations, is all. No crisis. We’re even havin’ coffee, see?” He leans over the desk in front of me, picks up my coffee mug, and takes a sip, pulling a face at the lack of sugar. “That’s yours, Carter.” He hands it to me with a grin that I can’t stop myself from returning. He didn’t have a mug.

When he eases back to face the screen, his thigh is pressed firmly against mine.

Dad’s smile lingers.

“Okay, so what does this test of yours require of me?” He asks.

“Just to try to dial us while we’re dialled in to another gate. If my subroutine works correctly, you should get the standard engaged signal, but when our wormhole disengages, we’ll be able to spot your gate’s energy signature and know you’ve been trying to reach us.”

My dad folds his arms, and I take a slow sip of coffee to steady the nerves that suddenly started building. Showing him my work will always make me feel five years old.

“Sam, if this works, we could use it to spot attacks, not just missed connections.”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Told ya it was cool,” Jack grins next to me, folding his arms in an echo of my dad’s posture.

“Okay, well, when do we do this? Now?”

“If you have five minutes now, then yes,” I answer. “We’ll dial an uninhabited world as soon as we disconnect. Give us a two minute head start, then dial us. And in three minutes, I’ll shut down our connection, pick up the logs and call you back.”

“Sounds good. Speak soon.” And he severs the link.

Four minutes later, we break the link to PX3503 and crowd around Walter’s monitor.

There it is. A signal captured in the background activity that matches the signature of the Tok’ra home world’s call precisely.

Jack’s hands land on my shoulder and Walter’s and give us both a brief shake.

“Way to go,” he says. “C’mon Carter. We’d better call your dad back on schedule. I’m a little scared of him.”

I roll my eyes while Walter starts to dial.

As soon as the last chevron locks, Walter scoots his chair out of the way and pads to the door, motioning at his empty coffee cup. I have a sneaking suspicion that Jack is lying about the feelings my dad evokes, but that they’re not that far from the truth for Walter.

“So, did it work?” Dad starts without preamble.

Jack nods, beaming. “Like a charm. What did you expect from your daughter?” He jostles me with his elbow.

Dad smiles warmly, but his eyes hold shadows that bother me.

“Nothing less, of course. Are you gonna come over to help us install a version of this patch, too, Sammy? It would be good to see you.”

A cold spot blooms between my shoulder blades. My dad doesn’t call me Sammy except when he’s sad.

“Dad, are you okay? You look tired.”

“I’m good, kiddo. Don’t worry about me. It’s just a nice surprise to see you at Thanksgiving.” He pauses, his smile fading into a look of love.

“You’re looking good, Sam. I must confess, I had my reservations. About Pete. But you look really happy.”

Blood chases up my neck and across my face.

“Oh, Dad! Um. I’m. That’s over.”

“Oh, thank God.” He sighs. “No wonder you’re looking better.”

Next to me, a strangled sound turns into a cough. But I can only deal with one man at a time, right now.

“Dad!” I wave my hand at the screen. “I _asked_ you what you thought of him! And you said he seemed nice!”

The spluttering cough next to my left shoulder rises again, and Jack swings away, choking.

“Sorry, need some water,” he wheezes.

“Sam.” Dad’s mouth purses into a long-suffering grimace. “Remember how well you took it when I told you you’d made the wrong call to turn down NASA for a chance to do deep space telemetry for the Air Force? Remember how you didn’t speak to me for three years? I wasn’t gonna risk that again. Besides. You were right about the Air Force. I thought you deserved my trust on this, too, even if I couldn’t see a single redeeming feature about him.”

The joy of the day deflates like a pricked balloon. I fold my arms around my waist. My eyes drop to the desk in front of me, unable to face my father’s knowing stare.

A hand, gentle, but warm and solid as the mountain, settles on my shoulder.

“Well, your happiness has to do with more than just Pete, though, doesn’t it, Carter? Tell Dad about the new man in your life.”

My heart thuds to a halt. What the hell is he doing? We almost didn’t tell Daniel and Teal’c because of the risk of being caught, not to mention the sickening dread I feel clawing at my gut when I think of him losing patience and dumping me. But to announce it over a recorded SGC channel? To my _father?_

_“_ She rescued this old ginger tomcat, Sir,” Jack’s voice rumbles on, lilting and casual, but the slightest pressure from his fingertips behind my shoulder blade, hidden from the camera, massages the cords of my terror-tight muscles.

“A real ball breaker, you know? Missing half an ear, got a gash across one eye. But he just melts into a puddle of purrs when she walks into the room. He worships her. And I think he’s good for her, too. Gets her out of here at a decent time most days to give him his dinner, if nothing else.”

I have to close my eyes against the tide of relief and love that washes through me. I feel his hand drop away. He steps in next to me, close enough for our legs to touch out of camera shot. His right knee nudges me.

“You should hear what she named him.” He prompts.

I’m smiling again, even if the smile is fragile.

“Pegasus, dad. Winged messenger.”

“That was what you called your My Little Pony doll when you were five, wasn’t it?” Dad laughs.

I nod, not trusting my voice.

“Well, Sammy, how about tomorrow when you come, you spend the night, and you can tell me all about this Pegasus. That okay with you, Jack? Can you spare her for a night?”

Oh, if only Dad knew how close that cut to the truth. But Jack smiles the bland smile of a professional.

“No problem, Sir. She’s already saved the world on her day off. She deserves a free night.”

“Excellent, it’s settled then. I’ll tell the Tok’ra engineers to be ready for your lessons tomorrow, Sam. Oh —.” My dad’s face suddenly looks drawn again. “Who look after Pegasus when you’re off world?”

“That would be me, Sir,” the answer comes from next to me. “Seeing as though I now fly a desk that’s chained to this mountain, it seemed the least I could do while she’s off having fun with my old team.”

There’s a hint of regret in Jack’s words, making me glance at him. One corner of his mouth is quirked into a rueful smile.

When I look back at my dad, some of the lines of tension that worried at his eyes have disappeared.

He nods, silently.

A second passes, and my dad’s voice is strangely thick when he speaks again.

“Take care of her,” he says quietly, looking at Jack.

“Oh, no, Dad, Peg’s a male!” I laugh, desperate to lighten the suddenly serious tone.

Dad turns his gaze on me, his eyes shining.

“Yeah, Jack mentioned that,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Kiddo. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Happy Thanksgiving, Dad,” Jack and I say in unison before the connection fizzes out.

My fingers find papers on Walter’s desk to tidy while my mind spins around the conversation we’ve just had. Something’s wrong with my father. He shouldn’t look this tired. Not with Selmak to protect him. And I should have told him about Pete. I’ve only just found my relationship with him again. I shouldn’t have let him wait. And what did he mean by that cryptic phrase, take care of her? Does he suspect how I feel?

Jack’s fingers close around my nervously tidying hand.

“Hey.” His voice is a whisper, his body angled so the cameras can’t see our touch.

“Something’s wrong with him Ja—Sir. He shouldn’t look this tired. Not with Selmak. And him wanting me to stay longer, gathering their engineers…”

His fingers lace into the spaces between mine.

“Sam. Save one world at a time. Whatever it is, he’ll tell you tomorrow. If it was more urgent than that, he would have asked you to come right away.”

I nod. He’s right. I’m just strung out on emotion, high and low. He anchors me.

“Is it over?” Walter asks from the doorway.

Jack’s fingers slip out of mine, coming to rest, steepled, on the pages I’d been tidying. Close, but innocuous.

I turn to Walter, flashing a smile.

“He’s not _that_ scary, Walter,” I joke.

“Maybe not to you, Colonel,” he grunts. “But he reminds me of my third grade math teacher.”

“Well, brace yourself, Walt, because tomorrow morningyou have to see him again. Carter’s going across to teach the Tok’ra how to apply that patch the two of you built.” Jack grins as he steps back to let Walter take his seat again.

I feel for Walter. My dad wasn’t kind to him the first time they met. I didn’t overhear the full conversation, but _I don’t care if you get a crick in your neck or stand on a chair, you will look at her face, not her chest_ had echoed clearly across the room.

“Maybe we should name this patch,” I muse, “The Merriman Equation. What do you think, Walter?”

“Carter-Merriman would be most appropriate, Colonel,” he answers. But his chest swells and his shoulders pull back proudly. And he carefully looks me straight in the eye.

“Good man, Walter.” Jack claps him on the back before turning to me.

“Carter, walk out with me. Catch me up on the things you’re puzzling away at here, so we can cover you while you’re visiting Dad.”

Our steps fall into each other’s rhythm, stride matching stride. His shoulder brushes mine.

“Do you have stuff you want me to keep an eye on, work-wise? In case you need to stay more than one night?” He asks after a few moments of easy togetherness.

I shake my head. “Nothing you don’t already know about, Sir.”

“Okay. And do you need me for anything now?”

“No. I’m almost done myself. I’ll get a few things together for tomorrow, but…” I trail off.

At home, a silver dress hangs in my closet. One I thought of wearing tonight. For him. One I still want to wear, despite my father, despite leaving tomorrow. Maybe even more now, _because_ I’m leaving tomorrow.

His footsteps slow.

“Sam?” He doesn’t turn towards me, because we’re in a camera-lined corridor.

“I was wondering if you wanted to come to my house tonight for a vegan dinner?”

Having to keep my voice low, to allow our echoing steps to disguise my words, strangely makes it easier to get them out without freezing with embarrassment.

He pulls up short, then strides on.

“God, yes,” he murmurs.

I release a relieved sigh, drawing a surprised glance.

“In which universe would I say no?” He asks, sounding genuinely shocked.

He anchors me. With his humour. With his certainty. With the way he sees into my soul.

“Six Thirty?” I smile. “And, Jack, if you want. Bring an overnight bag.”


	10. Silver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fabric ripples as I move, revealing the line of a rib here, the dip and curve of my belly there. And picking out the scalloped lace edge of my panties. 
> 
> Shit. I’m sure that’s not supposed to happen. How do actresses wear things like this without showing their underwear?
> 
> Well. There’s only one remedy. Candlelight. And plying him with enough wine that he won’t look at me too closely.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just because, in my dreams, Sam is every bit as awkward as me when she's getting ready for a date.
> 
> A moment of lightness in dark days, I hope.  
> For @benn2284
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

The silver dress stares up at me from my bed.

It’s simple. Silky fabric with a shimmer that ends two inches above my knee. It’s not skin tight, but the fabric is soft enough to hug every line of my body, apart from the neckline, where a wider cut means it drapes gently from my shoulders, scooping below my collar bones and skimming the top of my breasts, making them the one part of my body that’s slightly enhanced.

Most people would call this a modest cut. The same boutique had a backless version that they insisted I try on and just about begged me to buy, because they said it looked so good on me. But I live in combat boots. I need the reassurance of underwear.

I spent more money on this dress than on any other item of clothing I own. And though I’ve had it for years, I’ve still never summoned up the courage to wear it. Because I’ve never felt the way I do with him.

The fear is there.

Of course it is.

Fear that he’ll look at me and find me lacking, that he’ll touch me and I’ll leave him cold. That I’ll make promises my body won’t let me keep.

But underneath my doubt runs a warm current, fuelled by his words, his reassuring hand on my shoulder, the smile in his eyes. And by the way I feel when I think of his body pressed against mine, with nothing separating him from my skin except a shimmer of silver.

In my closet, my bag for the trip to the Tok’ra home world is packed. In my lab, the code waits on an encrypted drive. But that’s tomorrow’s business. Tonight, I am just Sam.

I pick a pair of lacy panties, midnight blue shot through with gold. One luxury I allow myself. I don’t own a sexy bra, though. Just the kind meant to keep me in place and avoid making it too obvious that I’m a woman. At least I have one in midnight blue.

A teardrop-shaped crystal on a delicate silver chain is all I add, and a touch more mascara than usual.

The dress still waits for me on the bed.

Puffing out my cheeks for courage, I pick it up, hold it between the mirror and me, and step into it. The zipper glides up without resistance. Thank goodness my body hasn’t changed in the past five years. I smooth my palms down over my ribs, tug gently at the hem. I’m sure it’s shorter than I remember.

I step into the pair of low-heeled black sandals — the only pair of delicate heels I own — and look nervously at my own reflection.

The fabric ripples as I move, revealing the line of a rib here, the dip and curve of my belly there. And picking out the scalloped lace edge of my panties.

Shit. I’m sure that’s not supposed to happen. How do actresses wear things like this without showing their underwear?

Well. There’s only one remedy. Candlelight. And plying him with enough wine that he won’t look at me too closely.

Before I can lose my nerve and slip back into jeans, I close the closet door, hiding the mirror.When I spritz some perfume onto my neck, Peg rises dramatically to his paws on the bed and sneezes meaningfully in my direction.

“Yeah, well, Peg, you get to cuddle me every other day,” I shoot back. “Tonight’s your dad’s turn. And believe me, I need all the help I can get. I mean, not that your standards are low. But I’m giving him vegan food and still asking him to like me.”

My cat blinks both eyes slowly at me and stalks over to the edge of the bed to rub his head against my thigh.

“I know, Peg. I’ll always have you. And you’ll always have me, whether you want me or not. Come on, help me set the table.”

Jazz is drifting through the air, and I’ve just lit the last candle, when I hear his truck pulling into the driveway. A sudden storm of butterflies flips my stomach. But then Pegasus thunders to the door, meowing as if the world will end if I don’t open it for him this second.

My furry wingman, saving me from my brain. With a chuckle at the orange and white ball contorting itselfat my feet, I pull open the door.

He’s swopped his habitual baggy jeans and oversized t-shirt for slacks and a white collared shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal the muscles of his forearms. His overnight bag is slung over his shoulder, leaving one hand free to hold a bottle of champagne by the neck, the other a bunch of pale yellow roses. A triangle of tanned chest peeks out from the deep V cut by the shirt’s unbuttoned neckline.

I open my mouth to say hello, to comment on how good he looks, but I don’t know what words to use. _Good_ is far too pale a word. _Edible_ comes closer.

I glance up with a guilty smile.

His lips are parted, his eyes dark and wide.

“Fuck, Sam.” He breathes. He opens his mouth again, shakes his head, says nothing.

I’m not sure what to do with this.

“Um.” I duck my head. “Can I take these for you?”

Seeing his hands released, Peg redoubles his meows, hoarse with excitement at the imminent feel of his dad’s strong hands around him, lifting him into the air.

But as soon as they’re free, Jack’s fingers trace the lines of my jaw, the skin of my neck, the line of my shoulder. His lipsfeather against my mouth, catching my breath on the tip of his tongue.

I lean in closer, not daring to move and burst this perfect bubble, yet wanting so much more.

At our feet, Peg’s meows fall silent, followed by a shuffle and a thud.

Jack jerks back with a gasp. Ten pounds of ginger cat, with ears pulled flat in anger, are attached to his trouser leg and leopard-crawling their way resolutely up his thigh.

“Pegasus!”

I find my voice as Jack staggers backwards, grabbing at the cat to dislodge its claws from his leg.

The second Peg is in his arms, his ears shoot innocently forward and a purr loud enough to drown the jazz from the lounge erupts from his throat. With a self-satisfied smirk, he buries his head in his dad’s neck.

“Oh dear. That may be me,” I sigh. “I put on perfume he didn’t approve of, and I told him my neck belonged to you tonight. I think he’s staking his claim before I perfume you, too.”

His arms wrap around the cat, gently but firmly holding him in place, as he steps through the doorway and kicks it shut behind him.

“Honestly.” His smile is the steam rising from a chocolate cake, dark and sweet and decadent. “I would take death by a thousand climbing cats to see you in that dress.”


	11. May I?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The roses are still clutched between us. He tugs them away from me, and sucks in a sharp breath. Discarding them on the counter, he sucks his index finger where a thorn raised a bead of blood.
> 
> I miss the heat of his mouth on my skin. And, with a giddy rush, I realise that I think both his lips and his finger are in the wrong place right now. His body, this dress, this moment, fizz like nitrous oxide through my veins. 
> 
> I’m reckless.
> 
> I’m in love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I don't like waiting either...
> 
> I could make you wait for the whole night to unfold, but I'm too impatient to see where it takes us!  
> xo

*Sam*

This is real. This is so real. I’m wearing this dress and I’m holding a bunch of roses he brought me and he’s walking behind me.

It’s real.

In the doorway to the kitchen, Jack’s bag drops to the ground.

“Hang on, Peg. I’ve got somethin’ in here for you, so good you’ll forget to use me as a jungle gym.With any luck,” he adds, under his breath. “Say, mom, you got a spare coupl’a kibbles there?”

Out of his holdall, he produces a lowslung wooden box, only two inches high and about ten wide, with arches cut at regular intervals along the sides and rectangular holes in the top.

“What’s that for?” I can’t hold in my curiosity as I pass him a handful of cat food. _Non-vegan_ cat food, I feel compelled to point out silently to our cat, who just mauled the man already willing to put up with a strange new diet for my sake.

Jack scatters the kibbles through the holes in the top and sets the box on the floor in a corner that doesn’t get as much foot traffic as the rest of the kitchen.

With a happy chirp and a flick of his tail, Peg pounces, nose in the holes at the top, paws swatting at kibbles from the top and the sides.

“That’s genius!”

The flowers in my hands are forgotten.

“Yah, well, I couldn’t have you telling me I’m making our cat obese,” he grumbles. His hands find my hips, pulling me gently back against his chest. His chin comes to rest on my shoulder and we both watch our cat losing himself in his new food box.

“Not my design. I saw it in a pet shop. Though I tweaked it a little. The top slides off so we can clean it out in case he doesn’t get to all the food. The ones in the shop were just glued shut.”

His cheek moves against my neck as he talks, raising goosebumps. His arms circle my waist. His lips drop to my shoulder. And I want to comment on the box he made, the beautifully crafted joints and rounded edges, but all I can feel is his lips on my skin.

He turns me around.

“You look incredible,” he sighs.

His kiss is deep and gentle. Unhurried. His hands flow over my dress, charting my body through the fabric. His body is hard against me. Hard, but not demanding. This is familiar, yet brand new. Under my nerves, over my fear, a sweet throb starts to burn.

His lips slide to my jaw. I arch my neck to get him closer.

The roses are still clutched between us. He tugs them away from me, and sucks in a sharp breath. Discarding them on the counter, he sucks his index finger where a thorn raised a bead of blood.

I miss the heat of his mouth on my skin. And, with a giddy rush, I realise that I think both his lips and his finger are in the wrong place right now. His body, this dress, this moment, fizz like nitrous oxide through my veins.

I’m reckless.

I’m in love.

I look into his eyes.

I take the finger he’s nursing, pull it towards me, wrap my lips around it. My tongues soothes the pinprick wound.

His breathing grows ragged, his pupils blacken his eyes. He doesn’t speak, but he trembles against me.

I slide my hands along the edges of his shirt, tracing the tanned flesh. I pop one button, deepening the triangle of exposed skin. My fingers find the soft curl of hair on his chest and a soft sigh escapes me. No part of his body captivates me as completely as the sparse salt and pepper on the muscles of his chest.

His hips move closer, giving me permission.

I undo another button, then another, and the last gives away, exposing the planes of his stomach.

“Sam.” He smoothes his hands over my cheeks, my jaw my neck, drawing a trail of moisture from my mouth along one side. The slightest pressure from his hand moves my feet. My body spins on his unspoken command. My head drops forward. His lips on my neck raise the hairs along my spine.

His fingers come to rest at the top of the zipper that holds my silver dress closed.

“Sam. May I?”

_Of course!_ My mind screams. _Why would I be standing here if I didn’t want you to?_

But a moment of clarity drops into my heart. _He knows about Jonas. He’s asking permission, because wants me to know he’s different._

I don’t deserve this much care. I don’t deserve for someone as powerful as him tohold back and ask me for permission. I don’t deserve for someone as good as him to want me at all.

His hands drop away.

“I’m sorry. Let’s get the flowers in water.”

_“_ No!” I swing to face him. “No. I—“ I wet my lips. I wish I had a way to tell him what I see. To tell him how much his care means to me. How he drives my love to overcome my fear.

_He drives my love to overcome my fear._

I take his hand and pull him with me, down the passage, to the bedroom.

At the foot of the bed, I turn my back to him. Fear hammers in my throat. But hope throbs in my chest. And love burns in my belly.

I guide his hand with mine, back to the zipper of my dress.

“Yes,” I say.


	12. I love you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I love you," I repeat. A mantra spoken too many times in silence, in solitude. A triple rhythm beaten into my bones.
> 
> If he pushes me away now, I'll understand. What's important is not where this goes, but that he knows.
> 
> "I love you." The words die on my lips, because they come from him.
> 
> His fingers rest over my lips. His hips thrust slowly into my hand. His breath is fast and hot. As his one hand presses me closer to his leg, the fingers of the other push into my mouth.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, hell yes. Finally.
> 
> Unicorns, this chapter would have been a pale imitation of itself without @XwingKC, who pulled me into shape while writing her own drool-worthy stuff. 
> 
> All kudos left here will automatically transfer to her in AO3 heaven xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

He guides the dress over my shoulders, down my arms. It slips over my hands and is replaced by his fingers. I smile to myself in the darkness. This is my dream. His fingers in mine, his lips tracing patterns on my skin.

His right hand slides back up my arm, along my shoulder, down my ribs. His palm comes to rest on my belly while his mouth raises fire on my neck.

He moves without hurry. As if his only goal is the next kiss. Soft saxophone sounds seep in around us, the melodies familiar yet barely heard. His fingers in mine are the only brace I need to toe off my sandals and step out of the confines of the fabric pooling at my feet.

I feel like a dancer, not a soldier, when I pivot on my toes to face him.

That’s his power. To look at me and make me feel that I deserve my dreams.

I run my fingers along the muscled planes of his chest, tease the salt and pepper curls. He sighs when my lips follow the path of my hands, gasps when I run a nipple under my tongue.

I know he’ll need more soon, but for now all I want is the taste of his skin, the sound of his breath responding to my touch. I let my hands flow lower, over the cut and curve of his stomach, tugging his shirt out of the confines of his trousers.

My fingers have already found the buckle of his belt when a puzzle piece clicks into place. _I can get excited about trying new tastes with you_ , he said last night.

We’ve been here before. But tonight can be new.

I look into his eyes.

“Jack.” I swallow. “May I?”

His hands cup my face. His kiss is tender. 

“Yes,” he whispers.

Like me, he uses my hand as an anchor to toe off his shoes, step out of his clothes. We don’t need words. In combat, or in love, pressure from his thumb is enough to show me his thoughts. He guides me closer. His left hand touches the wings of my shoulders, my neck, my hair while his right hand stays in mine, our fingers tangled in the comfort that is so close, it’s almost friendship. His lips float from my eyelids to my cheeks, charting every line and curve until I can’t wait any longer for a kiss. My whole body responds to his mouth, from the thrill on my skin to the way my nipples pebble and harden to the rush of sweetness at my core. He’s slow, and deliberate, and the more slowly he moves, the harder my desire pulses.

With a sigh, I reach for him, take his hot, silky length into my hand. 

He shudders against me, pulls out of our kiss.

“Sam. Not yet.” He leans his forehead against me. “You feel so incredible. I… I don’t want it to be over yet.”

A knot that has lived in my stomach for years loosens. I don’t know what it’s called. I can’t name what it was that held me so tightly in its fist. But its release feels like permission.

I soften my shoulders. My lips curl into a smile of their own accord. I look him in the eye, seeing his uncertainty dissolve as I nod. Release, permission, giddy happiness, chase through me and bubble out as laughter. 

Here he is, the man I’ve loved for so many years, asking me to do nothing for him.

I wrap my arms around his neck, fold against his skin, and breathe in the upside-down beauty of it all. I feel the smoothness of his lips giving way to the prickle of his stubble under my tongue, taste the dusky salt of his skin, sense the life of his pulse as it throbs through his neck.

I have time to linger on every muscle in his chest that rises with his breath. My fingers in his hand pull him down, guide him backwards to sit on the edge of my bed. Only then do I release his hand, to reach behind me and unclasp my bra, to push my panties down my legs.

The old fear lifts its slimy head in my gut. But he pulls me back to him, lying down beside me, skin to skin. His lips rain softness on my mouth, his thumbs find the knots in my back and ease them. His leg slips between mine, ankles locking together. Our bodies are pressed so close that I can feel his heartbeat, feel each shift in his arousal, and he can feel the heat of my core against his thigh, yet we just lie together, finding peace in closeness.

In colonial times, young people destined to be lovers would be bundled together for the night, so they could learn to find comfort in each other’s presence without sex. I would die for him in combat, jump into oncoming fire, stand between his enemies and his escape, but my heart needs help to find its way back to my smile. His hands drift lower, to the small of my back, and come to rest there.

And in the velvet night, with his body as my shield from darkness, my heart throws her arms around his shoulders and releases herself to him. 

"I love you."

The words float in the air around us. I've said them before. So has he. Sometimes in anger, sometimes in longing. In my case, most often when he wasn't in earshot. Tonight, I want him to hear me.

I rise up on one elbow. A whisper of pressure on his shoulder rolls him onto his back, underneath me. His hands slide to my hips, strong enough to steady me, yet giving me freedom.

"I love you," I say it again.

In eight years, I have found so many different ways of saying this to him. Laughing at his jokes. Going along with his plans. Having breakfast with him in the commissary at seven in the morning when I'd rather be sleeping. Having lunch with him in the commissary when I'd rather be in my lab.

Tonight, I find one more. I straddle his left thigh, rocking my hips into him. I drag the fingers of my right hand over his chest, along the stubble of his jaw, into his mouth. I know he can feel the desire that rushes through me when his tongue circles my fingers, sucks them in.

This, too, revealing my body's reaction to him; this, too, is I love you.

My hips rock against him. I tug my fingers free of his tongue and run them along the length of his erection. His groan evokes a visceral response in me. I know he can feel my skin rippling with gooseflesh. I want him to know. This, too, is I love you.

I raise my body to look into his eyes as my hand circles him and starts to glide slowly up and down.

"I love you," I repeat. A mantra spoken too many times in silence, in solitude. A triple rhythm beaten into my bones.

If he pushes me away now, I'll understand. What's important is not where this goes, but that he knows.

"I love you." The words die on my lips, because they come from him.

His fingers rest over my lips. His hips thrust slowly into my hand. His breath is fast and hot. As his one hand presses my me closer to his leg, the fingers of the other push into my mouth.

"I love you," he breathes, his eyes black on mine. He trails wet fingers down my chest, surrounds a puckered nipple, echoes my whimper with a moan.

Harder, deeper, more insistent, his hips thrust against me, I move against his thigh, his eyes hold me in thrall.

Suddenly, his arms surround me, pull me against him. He pulses under me, his release spreading on my skin, driving my own.

The room spins, filled with burning stars.

"Sam," he shudders.

And that, too, is I love you.

I’m drifting in his arms when my stomach releases a growl worthy of a mountain lion.

He chuckles, presses his lips to my neck. 

“C’mon. Let’s eat.”

There’s a strange thrill in dressing again, handing each other our clothes. It feels subversive, somehow. He grins at me as he stoops to pick up my dress and take his shirt. 

“”Wait.” I stop him with his hands hovering over the buttons. 

He frowns puzzlement at me.

“Um.” Oh, boy. Now I have to finish the thought. “Can I, uh, keep the view of your chest?”

I duck my head to hide the furious flush on my cheeks.

His laughter rumbles through me as he pulls me closer. 

“Damn, Carter. I didn’t think I still had it in me to blush.”

I risk a glance up. His cheeks are stained a delicate pink.

Clearing his throat, he steps around me to pull up my zipper.

“Food,” he says sternly as his hands on my shoulders push me to the door. 

“And some ice cold champagne to cool me down.”


	13. Dad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I bounce my knee through the endless political show of the debriefing with the Tok’ra high council. It’s midday by the time dad and I are alone, eating lunch before I head back to earth. Like last night, it’s been laid out just for the two of us in his room.  
> “Dad, are you eating alone because you’re not well?”  
> The lines around his eyes are deep today. The council meeting took a toll on him. And if just sitting around a table talking tires him out, he really doesn’t have much time. Cold coils around my heart.  
> He shakes his head. “I usually eat with the others. But I have some things to give you.”
> 
> From his desk, he picks up three envelopes, and two keys on long chains.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to start this chapter with a massive thank you to every single one of you. The Pegasus series grew out of a need to make meaning in a trashfire of a year, and your kindness and comments have given ME meaning, when I set out to give that to other people.
> 
> Thank you feels inadequate, but... thank you.
> 
> Now, as you can tell, this is THAT chapter. I love Jacob. But on screen and in my head, he has a lot to do with finally bringing Jack and Sam to each other. So I'm not sparing her that sadness, but I hope you'll find solace in the way I twisted Jacob's onscreen departure for this version of their reality.
> 
> If you don't want to end the year on a sad note, wait two more chapters, and then catch up. By my reckoning, today is 29 November in their world. Which means tomorrow, Jack's voice is back. And in two days, it's time for Sam to discover her Advent Calendar! 😈
> 
> Whether now, or later, I wish you happy reading, and a 2021 that contains a thousand moments of happiness for every moment of sadness.  
> xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

By the time I slide between the sheets in the Tok’ra guest suite, I have no energy left to cry. The day has wrung me dry of emotion. I am an empty, cold shell.

I’d woken in Jack’s arms, warmed by the memory of the night before. Of champagne bubbles on my tongue, my body In his hands. Of the way he’d pulled me closer on the couch after dinner, pushed my dress up with a naughty teenage grin and brought heaven crashing down on me with his tongue.

This morning as I left for work, with my holdall already slung over my shoulder, I’d looked back into the bathroom and seen a second toothbrush next to my own, and the day had been tinged with hope.

Getting the security subroutine installed in the Tok’ra gate had been harder than expected though, partly because the gate, like the world, was only temporarily theirs. That meant less infrastructure than on earth. Combine with that their need to leave no trace of their activity behind, and it meant supervising ten different technicians while they practiced installing it and removing it again. All the while, Dad had hovered, looking tired but proud. Telling me every person’s name. It added to the gnawing worry in the pit of my stomach. He was acting as if he was preparing for a long covert mission. He wouldn’t spend time making sure I knew every operator if he would be around for my future meetings with them.

The endless repetition and the growing unease had given me a pounding headache by dinner time, and I was looking forward to getting something in my stomach so I could take the painkillers in my mini med kit. The Tok’ra, of course, didn’t need headache tablets. They had symbiotes for that. Another coil of worry had sprung in my gut as I my fatter and I walked towards the communal dining area. He was the only person I had seen looking tired all day. Symbiotes were supposed to take care of that, too. The worry twanged again when he took my elbow and steered me past the entrance to the dining room, and on to his personal quarters where a meal had been laid out for two.

“Dad, what’s this about?” I’d dropped all preamble.

He’d smiled tiredly. “Just some father daughter time. You’ve had a lot of life changes recently. I want to hear about this Pegasus that Jack calls the new man in your life.” He sighed. “And I want to make sure you’re okay. I may not have thought much of Pete, but you clearly did. I know you don’t commit lightly. Breaking off an engagement is not like changing your mind about what you’ll order for lunch.”

Again with the food references. It was as if my dad and Daniel had been speaking.

“Dad, I’m fine. You’re the one who’s not okay. You’ve hovered all day, and you look exhausted. Are you about to go on a covert mission? Is that it?”

He’d huffed a dry laugh that didn’t reach his eyes.

“I guess you could call it that…

"Sam.” He closed his eyes. “Selmak’s dying.”

The water glass in my hand had rattled to the table, spraying drops.

“What? How?”

Dad had shaken his head, and when he’d spoken again, it was in Selmak’s deep voice. “I am four hundred years old, Samantha. That is close to the end of my natural life span, even without the toll the fight against the replicators took on me. Like Jolinar, I have the ability to donate my life force to my host. And your father needed it to stay focused long enough to find the correct modulation for you on that day.”

I’d jumped up, my hands in fists.

“What? You had no right! If you die, he dies! We could have figured out the modulation without killing you!”

“Sam.” It had been my father’s voice again, soothing. “It was my choice, not Selmak’s. He told me of the consequences. I asked him to let me stay with you. It may have cost us a few years, but it meant I could save the galaxy by my daughter’s side. That was a memory I wanted to make.” For the first time all day, his smile had reached his eyes.

But the hole in my chest was deep, and black.

“A few years? Dad! A few years is a lifetime!”

“I’ve _had_ a lifetime, kiddo. Including four years that made me incredibly proud, serving by your side. I don’t regret a single thing I’ve done since finding out about the Stargate programme.”

I’d felt the tears prickling behind my eyelids, but I couldn’t let them spill.

“How long do you have left?”

He’d shaken his head. “A month or two, maybe. We’re not sure. Selmak is weakening quickly. Their doctors have not seen a case like his, where an old symbiote donates some of its life force but not all.”

“A month or two?” My lips had been numb.

“If I’m still strong enough, I’d like to come home for Christmas. See you and Mark and Claire and the kids one last time. And meet this Pegasus. Tell me about him, now. How did you convince Jack to become your petsitter?”

I'd brushed his question aside. “Dad, you have to come back before then. Janet studied symbiotes. She found a way to help Teal’c. Doctor Jamieson can use her notes. We’ll find a way to help you, too.”

His hand had come to rest on my arm.

“Sam. The Tok’ra have been studying this for centuries. This is their life force. If they can’t do anything, there’s nothing to be done. I’ve had four wonderful years of borrowed time. I’m at peace with this. I want you to be, too. Now. Tell me about Pegasus.”

—oOo—

In the silence of the guest suite, I slip out of the bed and dig in my holdall for the clothes I’d worn today. I roll them into a ball and tuck them under my head as a pillow. When I lie down again, I crush the pillow they provided to my chest, rocking it back and forth. As if it’s Peg. Or Jack.

Someone who can give me comfort.

I’m awake before my alarm, determined to convince dad to come home with me. Dr Jamieson isn’t Janet, but she’s damn good. And as Anise so famously said, we Tau’ri are scrappy, but surprisingly good at figuring things out.

Dad is gentle with me this morning. He even brings me coffee, though he never drinks it any more in deference to Selmak.

I bounce my knee through the endless political show of the debriefing with the Tok’ra high council. It’s midday by the time dad and I are alone, eating lunch before I head back to earth. Like last night, it’s been laid out just for the two of us in his room.

“Dad, are you eating alone because you’re not well?”

The lines around his eyes are deep today. The council meeting took a toll on him. And if just sitting around a table talking tires him out, he really doesn’t have much time. Cold coils around my heart.

He shakes his head. “I usually eat with the others. But I have some things to give you.”

From his desk, he picks up three envelopes, and two keys on long chains.

“This is my will.” He hands the thickest envelope to me. “It’s not been notarised, but I made you the executor last time I was home, so that shouldn’t pose a problem. And these two are for you and Mark. To read when I’m gone. Keep them safe for me, please?”

My throat is thick. All I can do is nod.

“Thanks, Sammy. I know it’s not easy.”

He goes to drop the first key in my palm, but hesitates and hangs it around my neck instead.

“That’s the key to my safety deposit box. It contains the deeds to the houses, my share certificates, some of your mother’s jewellery. The will explains where everything should go.”

I’m not prepared for this conversation. “Houses? Plural?”

He shakes his head. “It’s not important, Sam. But you, and Mark, and both of your families will be okay. That’s what matters.”

His fist closes gently around the final key. It’s a gesture I recognise. I’ve seen that key before, around his own neck. Whenever he had a difficult decision to make, he would wrap his hand around it.

“This is for your mom’s safety deposit box. It’s contents are not in my will, because they aren’t mine to give. They were meant to pass straight from her to you. She asked me to give them to you on your wedding day. Her ring, and the earrings she wore at our wedding.”

“The ones she inherited from her mother? I thought they were lost!”

He shakes his head. “No. Apparently it is a tradition to hand them down only on the wedding day of the eldest daughter. She locked the earrings away soon after you were born. Made me promise to do the same with her ring if she didn’t get to your wedding herself.”

He falls quiet.

“I know you blamed me for her death, Sam.”

I open my mouth to protest, but he silences me with the smallest shake of his head.

“No. I need to say this. I blame myself, too. Every day. And I miss her, still.”

The tears I haven’t let flow spill out as I walk into his embrace.

“She would be so proud of you, kiddo,” he whispers into my hair. “So very proud.”

“Dad, keep it, please?” I ask when he pulls away and goes to hang it around my neck. “Keep it until Christmas, and give it to us then, when you come to visit.”

“I don’t know if I’ll make it, Sam.”

“You will. You have to.” _And I can’t take the memory of Mom from you._

“Dad, come back with me, please? Just talk to Dr Jamieson. Let her run an MRI and take some blood. Just let us try. Please.”

“Okay, Sam,” he says. And I’m not sure if it’s about mom’s key or about coming home until he steps up to the gate alongside me.

Jack is waiting at the bottom of the ramp in the SGC when dad and I walk through. The tension painting his face eases, but doesn’t disappear.

“Dad! That’s a surprise! What brings you to the Old Country?” He asks as the men clasp hands.

“My daughter, as you can imagine, General. If she ever gets tired of blowing up suns, she could do well as a negotiator.”

Jack snorts. “Yah. Tell me about it. So what did ya convince him to do, Carter?”

“To come see Dr Jamieson, Sir.”

The tears from earlier are still too close. My voice is barely more than a whisper.

All trace of humour leaves Jack’s face.

“Right you are, Colonel. Lead on. We can debrief when that’s done.”

I have to keep my hands busy while the MRI clicks and whirrs, so I pull up all the research Janet did on symbiotes. The files scroll off the page.

Too soon, my father is back with me. It’s only when he nods at someone behind me that I realise Jack has been standing in the doorway, watching, the whole time.

“Jack, can I talk to you for a few minutes before I head back?” My dad asks.

He squeezes my arm on the way past. “I’ll see you in the gate room in five, Sammy.”

The two men walk into the gate room slowly, like old friends wanting to prolong their togetherness. They keep in step until they’re right in front of me, when Jack hangs back and dad wraps me in a bear hug.

A hug from him is rare enough at work, and usually he pulls back after a brief second to step back into his role, but today he hangs on, pulling my head onto his chest, resting his cheek on my hair, like when I was five.

And today, I don’t care who sees it. I don’t want him to let go.

“I love you, Sam. And I’ll see you for Christmas, okay? It’s less than a month away.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

When he pulls back, I have to duck my head to hide the tears that I couldn’t stop.

I wrap my arms tightly around my waist and focus on slowing my breathing.

Dad stops next to me, takes Jack’s hand, then puts the other on his shoulder in a half-embrace.

Something silent passes between them.

Dad nods.

“General,” he says quietly.

“Sir,” Jack replies.

As the gate whooshes into motion and my dad walks away from us, Jack eases a fraction of a step sideways, and his left arm comes to rest against my right. He says nothing, does nothing more, and I’m grateful for that. Any more kindness right now would break me.

He seems calm, but his hands clench into fists at his sides.

Hidden in his left fist, a long chain, shiny with wear, catches the light.


	14. A star for Charlie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gate room empties slowly around us. I haven’t dismissed anyone, but ten minutes have passed since the wormhole closed. Clearly there’s no threat that needs guns here. I should have told them to go. 
> 
> But if I move, she has to. And she has enough to deal with. 
> 
> I will stand here until her tears dry and she can lift her head and be a colonel again.
> 
> I will stand here with her until the midnight shift change happens six hours from now, if that’s what it takes.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a longer chapter than usual, and writing it made me shed a few tears. But it ends with hope for both of them.
> 
> And tomorrow is 1 December for Jack and Sam.
> 
> Oh, and a little PS: Jack expresses some religious views here that I know not everyone will share. His views are not my own, either, and he will not try to convince anyone to see things his way, I promise. They are simply a reflection of my reading of his character.
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

Her agony radiates through her arm where it touches me. It stabs into my skin. I’m raw with what she must be going through.

The gate room empties slowly around us. I haven’t dismissed anyone, but ten minutes have passed since the wormhole closed. Clearly there’s no threat that needs guns here. I should have told them to go.

But if I move, she has to. And she has enough to deal with.

I will stand here until her tears dry and she can lift her head and be a colonel again.

I will stand here with her until the midnight shift change happens six hours from now, if that’s what it takes.

She purses her lips, stares at the empty circle that just stole her dying father.

“When would you like to debrief, Sir?”

I can hear the grief in her voice, but to anyone who hadn’t spent years watching her, it would simply come off as stress. Fuck, she’s strong.

“It can wait until tomorrow, Carter,” I attempt to ease her load.

I should know better by now.

Her shoulders tighten. Her mouth forms a thin, determined line.

“I’d rather get it done if you don’t mind, Sir.”

“Right you are, Colonel.” I look at my watch. “Thirty minutes? Sixteen forty five?”

“Thank you,” is her soft reply. She leaves the room without making eye contact.

Thirty minutes is the minimum time possible for her to type up a report on her visit to the Tok’ra home world. Any normal human would need two hours. But deadlines focus her. I’ve seen her give herself impossible deadlines for tying her shoelaces when she needed to stay cool in an enemy prison. Perverse as it sounds, her thanks when I told her to type up a four page report in thirty minutes was genuine.

The problem is, thirty minutes is too long for me to pace my office surrounded by my memories.

Somehow, everything I touch, turns to death.

That should make me better at helping her right now. But I’ve written the textbook on how _not_ to handle it. I turned so deep into my agony that I fucked my marriage, let my wife walk out when I should have fought for her, threw away my career.

Daniel should be giving Sam advice right now. Not me.

Teal’c. Not me.

For God’s sake, Cassie handled loss better than me when she was seven.

My hand closes convulsively around the safety deposit box key Jacob handed me this afternoon in my office, just before stepping back through the gate.

Our conversation wells up around me, clear as if he is still in the room with me and not a galaxy away.

“Jack, Selmak is dying. That means I am, too. And the Tok’ra don’t have new symbiotes to spare. Even if they did, I wouldn’t take one. Younger people than me are dying for lack of symbiotes. I’ve had a good life. I’m ready to go, as soon as I know Sam will be okay.”

“If you’re ready to die, then why do all the tests?” Surprise at his revelation had made me blunt.

Jacob had sighed. “The scans, the blood tests, they’ve all been done before. That’s not why I agreed to come.” He was tired but urgent. “I came so I could see you. I need to ask you to do two things for me. As a … friend. Not a colleague.”

He’d taken the key from around his neck. “This belonged to Sam’s mother. It should pass to her, but she wouldn’t take it.” He’d smiled sadly. “I think she remembers me wearing it, holding on to it when I wanted to ask Debra for advice. I’m sure I’ll still be strong enough to come home for Christmas. But if another war breaks out, or if Selmak can’t hold on… I want you to make sure she gets it. It’s theengagement ring and the diamond earrings generations of her mother’s family wore on their wedding day. I want to know she’ll have them, even if something happens to me.”

I’d looked at the key in my palm. “So you’ll be around for Christmas.”

“I think so. The thing is, Selmak’s weakening quickly.The Tok’ra doctors estimate two months. But our case is unique. Selmak’s old, and so am I.”

I’d nodded. Death was something I was more familiar with than life.

“And the second thing?”

“What?” For a moment, he’d looked so frail, I’d almost reached out to steady him.

“You said you came to ask me two things,” I reminded him, more gently this time.

“Right. Yes.”

He’d sunk into one of the chairs, looking at his hands.

“The second one is harder. Sam’s going to want to save me. She’s going to blame herself when I die, even though there’s nothing anyone can do. I want you to look after her. Make sure her grief doesn’t tear her apart the way mine did when Debra died.”

The blood had rushed out of my body. He didn’t know who he was talking to. Sam was blameless in his death. I wasn’t in Charlie’s.

“I’m not the right person to ask that of, Jacob.”

His eyes were grey-green, where Sam’s were the blue of the sky. Yet they pierced in the same way.

“You’re wrong, Jack. You’re exactly the right person.”

He’d stood with heavy limbs and walked to the door. Evidently, he’d said what he had come to say.

I close my fist around Jacob’s key.

I don’t know what she’s told him about us. I don’t know how much he’s figured out just by seeing how I look at her. I only know that I’m not the person who can show her how to handle grief with grace. All I know how to run away.

I’m not the right person for him to have asked that of.

A movement from the briefing room catches my eye.

She’s here.

It’s time.

I let her speak uninterrupted. I don’t need to interrupt. She handles every point, from the risk to the cost. Meticulous. There probably isn’t a single typo in her report, either.

Her father is carefully left out of any record. And that, too, is as it should be.

As she closes the folder and slides it across the desk to me, I catch her eye.

Her face crumples into pain, before she swings away.

“Carter.” My voice is roughened by the thickness in my throat. “What can I do?”

“Tell the blood analysers to work more quickly, so we can find out what’s killing him?” She blurts.

“Sorry, Sir. I didn’t mean that.”

I wish I could draw her into my arms, take the weight she’s carrying onto my shoulders.

“It’s okay, Carter.” I say instead. “I’ve contacted Bra’tak and Thor. Maybethey know something about your father’s situation that the Tok’ra don’t.”

Her smile is small and forced.

“Thank you.”

“Get out of here, Sam. Go home. Peg misses you.”

With a single nod, she pushes back her chair and leaves.

The afternoon heaps meetings on decisions. I’m ready to scream by the time I can escape. A quick view of the logs shows me she left the mountain not long after our debriefing. That’s something, at least.

My skin aches with the need to feel her warmth, to know that I am shielding her, physically at least. I drive past her house, but I can’t bring myself to go in. Instead, I head to the store, buy half a gallon of chicken noodle soup, and head home.

When the steam is rising from the pot, I call her cell.

“Sam, have you eaten? I’ve made enough chicken soup for you, and me, and Peg, and several armies.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line.

“Maybe Peg should come have some with you.” She sounds so tired. “I’m not great company tonight.”

I want to joke, but I can’t find the words.

“I’ll come fetch him,” is all I can find to say.

“No. No, it’s okay. I’ll drive him over.”

“Carter. Bring your laptop. I know you’re looking for solutions. You don’t have to do it alone.”

Half an hour later, she’s on my couch, a half-eaten bowl of soup forgotten on the coffee table next to her, Peg plastered to her left hip, purring like an idling truck.

I hover in the doorway. It was in the throes of Sara’s pain after Charlie that I reached for her, and she looked revolted at my touch.

I had run that night. And never learnt to stop.

I deserved to carry that pain alone. I had no right to any tenderness. But I remember the crushing loneliness like it was yesterday. In some ways, it’s never gone away.

I close my eyes.

She doesn’t have to carry this alone.

I sink down on the couch next to her.

“Give me something to read.”

She turns a silent question on me.

“I mean, one of the simple things. But let me help you. Two of us can cover more ground than one.”

With a sad smile, she pulls one of the thick books of egyptology out of the stack.

“I know it’s a long shot. But I thought maybe the pharaohs’ death rites can tell us something.”

“Gotcha.”

Twenty minutes pass in silence, before she turns to me.

“Thank you,” she says simply.

I scoot closer, tuck one leg behind her back and the other under her knees, giving her laptop a more natural angle to rest on.

And as she turns back to the writing on her screen, I recognise this for what it is. A chance to use my pain to soften hers.

I will never believe in a god again. Not while I have to believe that a god who is supposed to love us, stole a young life when he could have lived.

But for the first time, I believe that I may be able to use what I went through to help someone else I love.

_Make sure her grief doesn’t tear her apart the way mine did,_ Jacob had said this afternoon. _You are exactly the right person._

Perhaps he knew what he was talking about, after all.

I jerk awake when the book hits my chest.

She reaches over to take the heavy tome from me, her eyes soft like when they look at Pegasus asleep.

“You should go to bed,” she says.

I shake my head. “No. You’re not doing this alone.”

Her smile is wistful.

“Well, then maybe we should both go to bed. I don’t know what I’m looking for, anyway. Sometimes I figure things out in my sleep.”

There is such comfort in our silent night-time routine that I struggle to believe it’s her first time in my bed. Peg ignores his cat bed in the corner and loudly pummels the duvet behind her back into a nest, as soon as I switch off the light and pull her into my arms.

I can’t resist.

“It’s a Sam Sandwich,” I whisper.

Even her laughter sounds exhausted. But it’s laughter.

“Jack?” She asks after a few minutes of listening to Peg’s lip-smacking whole body wash. “What did my dad say to you before he left today?”

I sigh and pull her closer.

I don’t want to tell her about the key on its worn chain that now sits in my safe, along with my most precious possessions. She wanted Jacob to keep it. I don’t think she’s ready to know he gave up that memory for the certainty that she would have it.

I run my fingers slowly through her hair, drawing calm from her presence.

“He asked me to make sure your grief doesn’t tear you apart the way mine did.”

The truth opens a jagged wound in my chest. Those were not Jacob’s words, but they’re what he asked of me. And I don’t know how.

“How did you put yourself back together? I’m still not sure I have after my mother. I’m not ready to lose him, too.”

There is such anguish in her quiet words. Such a longing for an answer.

Irrational anger boils up at me. At Jacob for asking me to do this, and for dying. At a world that allows people like her to be torn apart.

“I didn’t. I haven’t. I’m the wrong person to have asked. Charlie’s death smashed me into a million pieces. I didn’t even want to live, Sam. All I’ve learnt in ten years is how to run faster than the darkness. And you’re already stronger than that. Just look at what you did tonight. You’re already finding ways to fight.”

Her whole body heaves with the violence of her breath.

“That’s how I run. Into books, into my head. To avoid facing the fact that I have to let him go. I can’t bear to live in a world that I can’t save. How childish is that?”

Her words are an echo of everything I’ve buried at the bottom of my soul. Except she fights with her mind. I fought with my body. All those years in black ops when I crossed the line from brave to reckless, hoping to atone.

“It’s not childish. It’s courageous. It’s beautiful. It’s powerful.”

I don’t know what more to say. I’ve never felt more inadequate. I thought it would help to have felt the pain she’s going through right now, but it only makes me feel more useless.

“Thank you for not letting me do this alone,” she speaks against my chest before we both fall into silence.

We’re both quiet in the morning. We move as if hung over, stepping softly around the wounds we opened for each other. There are deep smudges under her eyes. I wonder if she, like me, lay awake in the darkness, unable to forgive her pain.

We don’t mention anything about her situation until her books are under her arm, her laptop bag slung over her shoulder.

“Should Peg hang out here today?” I ask as I walk her to her car. “We can always swing by and pick him up later if you want to be home tonight.”

It was a choice of phrase so subtle I almost hoped she’d miss it, but she stops in her tracks.

Her arms are full, and maybe it’s better for my composure that she can’t touch me.

“You don’t know how much it means to have you next to me, Jack.”

_Next to me._

Those words sustain me when I want to run out of the mountain in the middle of the morning piles of paperwork. The three words keep me focused through SG-3 and -4’s next mission departure.

Finally, Bra’tak arrives, and we can do something for her again.

It’s a solemn procession into the briefing room. Bra’tak and Teal’c holding scrolls, Dr Jamieson clutching blood results and an MRI report filled with images of a brain, Daniel with his forehead pinched in concern and his fingers marking pages in old books. And Sam. Holding nothing.

“I expect you saw surprisingly normal blood results for a dying man in his seventies, Doctor,” Bra’tak opens the discussion.

Jamieson nods, her discomfort evident. She’s a great emergency surgeon, but the SGC may be a level of weird above her pay grade. I make a mental note to ask her whether she wants to transfer out if a spot becomes available in future. She’s better with gunshots than dying aliens.

“That’s the process of assisted dying,” Bra’tak rumbles on, while Teal’c nods. “It’s reserved for kings in our legends. Kings, and gods. The symbiote releases something like a sedative if it dies of its own accord. It slows the host’s metabolism down over a month or two, until they fall into a deep sleep and never wake. There is no pain.Our elder scrolls tell of vivid, lucid dreams just before they slip into their final sleep. Visions of a paradise where everyone they’ve lost is whole again.”

He hands the scroll he’s been holding across the table to Sam.

“I’m afraid I cannot offer medical solutions, Colonel Carter. But I hope this brings you comfort. Your father and Selmak are not suffering.”

Sam swallows audibly as she takes the scroll from him.

“Sedation. That makes sense,” Jamieson speaks, her voice high-pitched with nerves. “His blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate were all lower than on his last physical on record. I was expecting some elevation due to pain or organ failure.”

Sam’s mouth hardens. “Any sign of cancer markers?” She hasn’t managed to hide the annoyance in her voice. Or maybe she hasn’t tried.

The white coated, white faced medic shakes her head.

“Good,” Sam shuts her up with the single word.

Daniel grins apologetically at Jamieson.

The room falls into awkward silence that it’s up to me to break.

“Anyone else want to add something?” I ask quietly.

Four heads shake. Only Sam stays silent, looking at the scroll in her hands.

“We are deeply sorry for your loss, Colonel Carter,” Bra’tak speaks again. “Your father will be deeply missed, and honoured as a warrior king.”

“He’s not dead yet, Bra’tak,” I snap, but Sam shakes her head and looks up, eyes full.

“No, he’s right, Sir. Thank you, Bra’tak.”

She swings to me, her chin trembling.

“Sir, may I…?”

I nod, and she strides out of the room, scroll clutched in front of her, head bowed to her feet.

Bra’tak’s departure feels like a funeral procession. Everyone on base walks with muted footsteps.

It takes an hour before I am alone again, and can go looking for her in her lab.

The door is ajar and soft voices come from inside. I knock twice, the touch of my knuckles swinging the door wide to reveal Daniel and Teal’c sitting next to her, mugs of coffee in all three of their hands.

Daniel smiles a welcome. “Coffee?” He asks as he rises to give me the seat next to her.

I shake my head and wave him back down. Being next to her without touching her would be impossible right now. And there are cameras pointing down at all of us. I lean against the table instead, forming the point of an uneasy diamond.

“Watcha guys discussin’?” I open casually.

It’s Sam who answers, her voice clear and more peaceful than I’ve heard it for a while.

“Christmas,” she says. She shakes her head slightly, as if at herself. “I was looking for the wrong answers, Sir. Dad’s coming home for Christmas. I should be working on making good memories while he’s here.”

I look at the team that will always feel like my home, no matter where our jobs take us. I know she’ll fall back into blame a hundred times between now and Christmas and a thousand more after that. I’ve lived through this.

But I also remember the serenity that comes from the first flame of hope. And I will help her kindle it with every breath I have.

“Good plan,” I say. “So, where do we start? Where do you usually buy your tree?”

“Uh, I just have a little synthetic one, like the one here at work.”

I slap the table playfully. “Carter, that will never do! Pegasus can’t climb a teensy plastic tree and wreak havoc with the ornaments!”

In mock disgust, I swing to Teal’c. “T, tell me you have a lead on a good tree, at least as tall as you.”

He closes his eyes, and solemny inclines his head. “Indeed I do, General O’Neill.”

“Good,” I grumble. “Apparently it takes an alien to get the earth traditions right. When do we go? I’ll be done in an hour.”

“Team mission!” Daniel grins. “Excellent. I’ll be back in an hour to fetch you, Sam.”

Turns out the alien really does know where to find a good tree. The lot he drives us to is between nowhere and a trailer park, but the trees are fresh, and huge, with plump, glossy needles.

The manager greets Teal’c, now sporting his bandanna, with a fist bump and a flourish before taking us deep into the lot to show us the best specimens.

“Do you think that guy believes T is a famous rapper? Or a basketball star?” I whisper out of the side of my mouth as we follow them through he endless lines of trees.

“Rapper,” Daniel answers.

“I don’t know. I think he thinks Teal’c is an A-list actor. You know, in disguise,” she chimes in. “He probably spends every night watching obscure action movies to see if he can recognise him.”

“Ooh, good one, Carter.”

She chuckles, her breath clouding the air.

Teal’c picks a tree taller than himself for his apartment, Daniel a more modest two-footer. After much deliberation, she picks one just tall enough to fill the space next to her fireplace and wider than usual, with long branches that shimmy when you brush against them. Her tree looks like a dancer.

“What about your house?” She turns to me in the privacy caused by the commotion of loading three trees onto a jeep.

I’m suddenly grateful for the darkness. I still fall back into blame, even ten years later, and last night reopened wounds I thought had finally scarred over.

“I don’t do Christmas at my house.”

In the pine-fragrant darkness, her fingers find the lines around my eyes.

“I don’t want you to do this if it’s hard for you, Jack.”

I press my lips into her palm.

“These are new memories.”

Her fingers fold into mine as we follow the noise back to Teal’c and Daniel and the trees.

“We’ll put a star for Charlie at the very top of my tree, okay?” She says.

And I nod, even though I know she cannot see.

“I think he’d like that. Very much.”


	15. 1 December

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At least it’s light. Apart from not seeing where I’m going, carrying it in is actually quite easy. In the entrance hall, she stops. 
> 
> “It’s beautiful! It would look perfect opposite the Christmas tree.”
> 
> A bucket of iced water dumps itself over my head. Her father is going to be visiting for Christmas.
> 
> “NO! Bedroom. Bedroom.” I start shuffling in that direction, and connect painfully with the wall.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh yes. It's December first in the United States of Shiplandia.  
> That means Jack is about to get very embarrassed.
> 
> I hope you enjoy the next twenty four days (shiplandia time) of cuteness and sweetness and fun.  
> xo
> 
> \--oOo--

> _Dance,_
> 
> _Nothing left for me to do_
> 
> _but dance off_
> 
> _these bad times I'm going through_
> 
> _just dance_
> 
> _Got canned heat in my heels tonight, baby_
> 
> _\- Jamiroquai_

*Jack*

I woke up with Canned Heat by Jamiroquai on loop in my head, and it hasn’t stopped all day.

It’s the first of December.

And the damn butterflies in my stomach strapped on Jamiroquai’s giant, mirrored headdress and high heeled shoes while I slept with her in my arms.

It feels so bloody inappropriate to be bringing sex toys and lingerie into her house right now, as if I want to distract her from losing her father, with sex of all things. I mean, maybe distraction is what she needs. But what if she thinks I’m being crass? I can’t handle the look of contempt Sara gave me. Not from Sam.

Not from Sam.

The fucking butterflies won’t let up, though. They’re damn excited about this. Which, even a pragmatist like me has to recognise, means I’m excited about this.

Sam gets these flashes, these sparks of joy, sometimes when she touches me. And they rocket me into space. More than anything, I want her to own that happiness.

So the butterflies boogie, and I boogie after them, even as dread makes me chew my cuticles.

It doesn’t help that we haven’t spoken.

Nobody wanted the impromptu team night to end last night, so we swung by my house in Teal’c’s tree-laden Jeep to pick up Peg before driving to Sam’s to put up her tree and have pizza and beer while the game was on. We joked and laughed, even if it was a little fragile at times. I chased them out when I saw the exhaustion in her eyes, and the extent of our exchange had been her hand in mine as we reached the door of Teal’c’s Jeep, and her soft whispered _Stay?_

She was asleep by the time I’d showered and brushed my teeth. She still smelt faintly of fir tree needles.

This morning, I let her sleep as long as possible, and then it was a rush for her to shower and get ready before Teal’c picked us up again. Our three cars had slept in the parking lot at the SGC last night. I rolled my eyes when Daniel joked that the biggest benefit of my promotion was the fact that we didn’t have to explain that to the base commander. But he wasn’t really wrong.

And now the clock is heading toward four pm and we still haven’t spoken. She’s been off-world at the alpha site installing her and Walter’s patch, and she’s due back in half an hour or so.

I puff out my cheeks and make a decision.

I pull my cell out of my pocket and call one of the few non-military numbers I’ve saved.

“Kelsey, hey. Um. I’m sorry to bother you. Listen, I don’t know if you remember me…” I begin, tapping my fingers against the edge of my desk.

“Jack? Like I’d forget you!”

She pauses, then: “Oh, God! It’s the first of December! What did your girlfriend think about your advent calendar? Hang on, hang on,”

Her voice becomes muffled, as if she’s put her hand over her phone. I love the naïveté of people who think that actually stops the person on the other side from hearing them.

“Hey, Akheela! It’s him! It’s my sliver fox with the kinky advent calendar for his girlfriend!”

Jeez. I swipe self-consciously at the greying areas at my temples. Nothing like a girl in her twenties to make you feel ancient. At least I’ve been called worse things than a silver fox when people thought I was out of earshot.

“Okay, I’m back. Sorry. So what did she think? What did you give her first?” She’s breathless with excitement, and I realise for the second time that she wasn’t just being a good sales person on the night she helped me pick the contents of the calendar. She genuinely cares about this going well. I close my eyes.

“Actually, I haven’t given it to her yet. That’s why I’m calling.”

“Oh.”

I can hear her face falling.

“Um, I’m not sure we can give refunds, Jack.” The disappointment is tangible.

“No, that’s not why I’m calling!”

“It — it isn’t?”

I shake my head, at once feeling stupid for doing it over the phone. “No. I need your advice.”

“Oh,” she says again. “Why?”

My thumb smarts. I pull it out of my mouth and see a bead of blood rising from the edge of skin I’ve been worrying with my teeth. With a grunt, I shove it under my thigh.

“She just heard that her father is dying,” I sigh. “Isn’t it terribly insensitive for me to be giving her sex toys right now? Won’t she think I’m an ass?”

“Owwww, Jack.” She sounds like she’s talking to a kitten who’s just fallen into the bath. “Hang on, I’m gonna put you on speaker, okay? Akheela — that’s my girlfriend — she’s really good at this stuff. She’s studying psychology.”

“Fine,” I growl. “I could hear you when you talked to her, anyway.”

“Oh!”

I can’t help smiling at her embarrassment.

“Okay, you’re on speaker.”

“Hi, Akheela,” I grimace. I really hadn’t envisaged a lesbian group therapy session based on Psych 101.

“Hey, Jack. Whazzup?”

Well. I guess I’m in it, now.

“My girlfriend’s first boyfriend was … someone who doesn’t deserve to be alive. And he left her with dyspareunia and a fear of… Kelsey, I asked her, like you suggested. I don’t think she knows if it’s physical or psychological. I do know she was young. And he hit her. And I couldn’t ask more.” _Because I would have gone through the Stargate and killed him._

“I’m sorry, Jack.” It’s Kelsey’s voice.

“Yah. So am I.” I say through gritted teeth.

“Anyway, I wanted to show her that intimacy can be fun, and sexy, without doing anything that hurts her. But two days ago she heard that her dad is dying. And I don’t want to give this calendar to her if it will make me look as if I don’t care about what she’s going through.”

“Jack. Have you ever lost someone you loved?” Akheela asks.

All the air rushes out of my lungs.

“Yeah.”

“And when it happened, would you have liked for someone to remind you that there’s more to you than just your sadness?” Her voice is gentle.

I remember the team last night, the laughter over pizza and beer.

I find myself nodding along to the rhythm of Canned Heat all over again.

“Yeah. Yeah, I would have. Okay. Thank you, guys, um, girls.”

“Hey, Jack?” It’s Kelsey again. “I told you she’s lucky to have you.”

Thank fuck the gate alarm sounds at that moment.

“I gotta go. Thanks. Thank you.”

I have to pat my cheeks to make sure they’re cool before I leave my office to see her stepping back onto earth.

I sneak off base early, to triple check everything and load the tree onto the blanket lining the bed of my truck.

It’s just past Peg’s feeding time when I pull up at her house.

She’s at the front door with him in her arms by the time I drop the hatch on the bed.

The sight of her is enough to send the rhythm in my stomach into overdrive. One day, one day, I hope she realises how beautiful she is.

Peg squirms out of her arms and rushes the truck, pausing to sniff me before moving straight to the ribbon-wrapped wooden tree.

“That’s decidedly not for you, Peg,” I laugh as she approaches.

“Jack. Did you make that?”

I nod, shifting my weight from foot to foot like a schoolboy.

“It’s a bit big for a bee hotel.”

Her voice bubbles with suppressed laughter.

Grinning nervously, I run my hand up the back of my neck.

“The bee hotel is coming. This is for you. It’s an advent calendar. Um. I can carry it, but you may need to guide me up the stairs.”

The bloody thing is nearly as tall as Daniel’s Christmas tree.

At least it’s light. Apart from not seeing where I’m going, carrying it in is actually quite easy. In the entrance hall, she stops.

“It’s beautiful! It would look perfect opposite the Christmas tree.”

A bucket of iced water dumps itself over my head. Her father is going to be visiting for Christmas.

“NO! Bedroom. Bedroom.” I start shuffling in that direction, and connect painfully with the wall.

“But it’s perfect!” She protests.

“Sam,” I grit out. “Your father is visiting.”

I can see half of her past the edge of the tree. It has its hand on its hip.

“Jack. Seriously, what’s to hide! It’s a gorgeous, hand-made advent calendar.” She falters. “Oh.”

It seems to be the day for women to say that to me.

I clear my throat. “So, will you help me get this to the bedroom without walkin’ into any more walls now, please?”

We settle on the blank space of wall next to her side of the bed. When I finally set it down, the butterflies kick up yet another gear. It feels more like AC/DC than Jamiroquai in my stomach.

She looks at me appraisingly.

“Beer?” She asks.

“Beer,” I acquiesce.

We sink back onto the bed, each of us with a bottle in our hands.

She takes a long pull.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been given an advent calendar,” she muses. Her head tilts sideways. “I don’t think I’ve ever _seen_ one that big.”

_That’s what all the women say._ The joke is on the tip of my tongue. But what if it makes it sound as if I hand these out like candy?

I snap my mouth shut to stop the comment.

Her fingers touch my cheek, turn my face to her. Her lips linger on mine. When she pulls back, her eyes are sparkling with mirth.

“Has anyone ever told you how adorable you are when you’re nervous, Sir?”

“Carter, could you stop makin’ fun of me and open it? Please?”

My thumb is still tender. Despite that, I find my teeth worrying it as she lifts the old-fashioned hook securing the door labelled 1.

She pulls out the first day’s gift. My note is wrapped around the black satin mask with the word _HIS_ embroidered on it in gold.

I watch her opening the note.

I’ve memorised every word. Still, my breath catches in my throat when she reads it out loud, her voice soft and melodious.

“Sam. I could find a thousand ways to tell you that you’re beautiful, that my heart does stupid jiggly things when I see you,”

She huffs a laugh before continuing.

“That you’re more than perfect.”

She breaks off again, to look at me.

I try what I hope is an encouraging smile. Slowly, she looks down again and carries on reading.

“But there are only twenty four days to Christmas. So I’ve picked twenty four that I hope you’ll have fun with. Rule number one, though. The blindfold is for me. And only for me. You are in control. I see only what you want me to see. If there’s anything you don’t like, chuck it. Don’t even tell me, unless it is to make sure I never do it again.”

She wets her lips.

There’s one more line left on my note.

But she drops it to the ground.

She’s looking at me when she speaks the final phrase. And I’m not sure if she memorised it. Or if, by some divine coincidence, she’s speaking to me rather than repeating my words to her.

“Whatever happens, wherever this goes. I love you.”


	16. 2 December

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’m not cut out for love.
> 
> Here I am, in bed beside the man I’ve loved with a depth that drove me out of my mind when I thought I’d lost him, who I’ve desired with a power that made me ashamed, for close to eight years. I’ve loved him for longer than I loved Jonas.
> 
> And I feel like a fraud.
> 
> Because he’s given me his trust despite his pain, his kindness despite his sadness, his understanding though I deserved none of it. He’s showered me with gifts.
> 
> Yet I’m not the woman he thinks I am.
> 
> I have moments, sparks of joy, when I touch him and I feel so alive, when I see his love reflected back at me and my body reacts the way a woman should.
> 
> But I am not my moments. I am clumsy and unfeminine and trapped in my own head and infuriating. Outside my BDUs, I’m ten pounds of sausage squeezed into a five pound casing. I barely deserve his patience. I don’t deserve his gifts.
> 
> The more he gives me, the less worthy I feel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam walks into a dark stretch of the path towards her healing.
> 
> You may recognise Amanda's words in Sam's thoughts today. They hit me hard the first time I heard them.  
> If they hit you, too, and you don't have a Kelsey or an Akheela to call, hit me up on @PensiveVet at Twitter.  
> You don't have to face the darkness alone.
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

Maybe I’m just not cut out for love.

_Whatever happens. Wherever this goes, I love you._

My God, how I’ve dreamed of hearing those words. When I was seventeen, I longed with all my trembling heart to hear Jonas say them, just once, in front of someone else. He was wonderful in private, mostly. As long as I didn’t do something that angered him. But in public I was always a hanger on, always needing to live up to an expectation I didn’t know had been set until afterwards, when I realised I’d failed.

After I got over Jonas, I thought I’d be okay never hearing public words of affection again, in public or in private.

And then the man with the cynical mouth and the kind, broken eyes stood beside me the first time I prepared to step through the Stargate. And he said the words I’dconvinced myself I no longer needed.

_I adore you already._

In front of people.

And I knew it was a joke. It was intended to cut.

But it didn’t.

It made me see the kind and want to fix the broken, made me laugh at the cynical until it turned to less biting humour over the months that followed.

Made me fall in love.

But I’m not cut out for love.

Here I am, in bed beside the man I’ve loved with a depth that drove me out of my mind when I thought I’d lost him, who I’ve desired with a power that made me ashamed, for close to eight years. I’ve loved him for longer than I loved Jonas.

And I feel like a fraud.

Because he’s given me his trust despite his pain, his kindness despite his sadness, his understanding though I deserved none of it. He’s showered me with gifts.

Yet I’m not the woman he thinks I am.

I have moments, sparks of joy, when I touch him and I feel so _alive,_ when I see his love reflected back at me and my body reacts the way a woman should.

But I am not my moments. I am clumsy and unfeminine and trapped in my own head and infuriating. Outside my BDUs, I’m ten pounds of sausage squeezed into a five pound casing. I barely deserve his patience. I don’t deserve his gifts.

The more he gives me, the less worthy I feel.

Sometime after 2am, I slip out of his arms. The lounge is dark and cold, more familiar than the soft warmth of him in my bed. I sink onto the couch and wrap my arms around my ankles. A thud and a purr announce the arrival of my little ginger shadow.

My Pegasus. How I wanted to climb on the back of a winged horse and ride into the sky when I was a lonely little girl. How I want to do that now. But my Pegasus is missing half an ear and both his wings, and I’m no hero. I open my arms to him, and with his furry body as a blanket, I drift into cold, uneasy dreams.

I’m having the nightmare of the closet again. I’m stiff with cold, and everything is muted, even my alarm.

With a grumpy chirp, Peg jiggles off my chest and I jerk awake.

My alarm isn’t muted, it’s in my bedroom, and I’m in the lounge. I’m cold because only Jack’s jacket is covering me, my bare feet poking out.

Wiping numb fingers across eyes dull with fatigue, I pad to the bedroom to switch off the alarm.

My bed is empty.

At the bottom of my ribcage, cold certainty spreads like frost.

A note in his handwriting is on the kitchen counter, where he knows I place Peg’s food bowl to fill it for breakfast.

_I’m sorry. I never meant to push you._

I take a scalding shower to try to drum warmth back into my numb extremities, but even when my skin turns red, I regain no feeling.

The first night Jonas locked me in his cupboard was the night of my graduation. He’d accused me of coming on to every man I hugged at the ceremony. Told me he was too disgusted by my display to even look at me. An irrational part of my brain thought he would leave me locked in there forever.

I was stiff with terror and regret and lack of sleep when he dropped me at my base the next morning. Every congratulatory clap on my back, every fist bump, had felt as if it would shatter me.

The next time it happened, I curled up in a corner and slept, and the morning after wasn’t so bad.

This morning feels like the first time again.

I sleepwalk through the day. Seventeen more gate patches need to be installed on friendly worlds. I set up the appointments, find an excuse to leave my progress report with Walter, avoid Daniel and Teal’c at lunch and slink away as early as contractually possible.

Maybe if I can sleep I’ll feel better.

But my bed only holds accusation and a view of the gift he gave me that I don’t deserve. That he realised I don’t deserve. Otherwise, why would he have left?

Peg is plastered against me, his gentle purrs the only softness in my fragmented reality.

As the sun sets, I roll out from under restless covers to feed him, and stop in front of the calendar.

The knife is already in my gut. I might as well twist it.

With guilt-ridden fingers, I lift the latch on the door marked 2.

A golden ball rolls out and thumps dully onto the floor at my feet. A note flutters after it.

‘Champagne bath bomb’ is written on a metallic sticker caught in the cellophane surrounding the ball.

My heart thuds as I pick up his note.

_Sam,_

_You made it to day two without throwing out the calendar and me._

_That’s cause to celebrate._

_Tonight, pour a glass of wine and take a well-deserved soak, with or without me. Your call._

_Cleopatra bathed in asses milk. But ass-milk bath bombs are harder to find._

I sink to the floor next to the bed. I can hear his voice, his perfectly curated humour, in every word.

How did I fuck something this good up so badly? How did I become this broken?

Through a haze of hopeless tears, I read the last two lines.

_I confess that I had help choosing the gifts, from Kelsey at Forbidden Fruit._

_I didn’t tell her your name, but she also has dyspareunia. If you ever want to talk to a woman rather than to me, she said she wouldn’t mind._

A number is written at the bottom of the paper.

I don’t. I don’t want to talk to another woman. I don’t want to talk to anyone except to him.

But I blew that chance. If I take his offer of redemption, maybe I can get another chance somehow.

I drag the phone down from my nightstand and dial.

“Kelsey, hello!” A cheerful voice rings in my ear.

Fuck. I can’t do this.

I slam the phone down with trembling fingers.

Three seconds later, it rings in my hands.

“Carter,” I answer on autopilot.

“Hi. I just got a call from this number? But the connection cut. I’m Kelsey.”

A shuddering breath leaks out of me.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry to have bothered you Kelsey. You don’t know me…” my words run dry.

“Wait.”

A subtle change in acoustic on the line tells me I’ve just been placed on speaker phone. Sounding slightly hollow, Kelsey speaks again.

“I’m going out on a limb here, but do you have a boyfriend called Jack?”

“Yes,” I sigh, defeated.

“I know who you are. Well, I don’t know your name. Aaa-and, you don’t have to tell me, or anything. I just.”

“What is your name?” A second woman breaks in gently, as if she’s talking to a stray bird with a damaged wing.

“Sam,” I find myself saying.

“Sam, I’m Akheela. I’m Kelsey’s girlfriend. And I’m the one who told Jack to go ahead and give you the Advent Calendar, even though you’re dealing with the news about your dad. Please don’t blame him.”

Surprise knocks a hole in my defences.

“I don’t blame him,” I say before I can stop myself.

“Okay, good.” Akheela’s relief floods across the line at me. “So, how can we help?”

_I don’t know._

“I don’t know how to do this.” My lips are numb.

This is what happens when people feel they’re facing death, the rational part of my mind whispers. They confide in strangers. They confess their mortal sins to the person next to them on the train.

Kelsey’s soft, sighing laugh comes across the line at me.

“You start by telling him that. And then, you figure it out together.”

“Sam. Just hang on a moment. What happened to make you call?” Akheela is back on the line, worry tightening her voice.

“He left.”

She pauses, as if weighing up words. “And what happened before he left?”

“I… I fell asleep on the couch.”

A slow breath releases. “And what did he do?” She asks carefully.

“He covered me with his jacket and left a note saying he didn’t mean to push me.”

I fold my head forward on my knees.

“And did he? Push you? Before?”

Suddenly, her questions click into a pattern. She’s checking if I’m safe. That’s the reason for the careful wording, every sentence beginning with and. She’s running through a checklist to see if he’s hurt me.

The realisation bounces me to my feet.

“Akheela, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. Jack is not abusive. He’s the gentlest, he’s, I trust him with my life. I just — I don’t know how to live up to his love.”

_All I’ve learnt in ten years is how to run faster than the darkness._ The words he spoke in his bed two nights ago come back to me.

The weekend before last, a lifetime ago, when we’d fought in his cabin, he’d left, too. And I thought I’d lost him, too. But instead, on a dew-soaked morning, he’d given me Charlie’s favourite teddy and promised to spend his life trying to get up again when he fell.

And I know what to do.

Urgency floods me with warmth.

“Akheela, Kelsey. Thank you. Thank you. I need to go. I need to go talk to him.”

All I pause for on the way to the door and my car, is Charlie’s teddy.

The lights are on in his house, but he doesn’t respond to my knock. The door gives way when I twist the handle.

A faint whining noise comes from the garage.

He looks up from the jig saw when my shadow falls across the doorway. Slowly, he puts down the piece of wood he’s holding and switches off the machine.

In the deafening silence that follows, I take a step towards him, then another.

With a rush, he closes the distance between us and crushes me to his chest.

He smells of sweat and sawdust, and of home.

I press my face into his neck. His head drops forward onto my shoulder.

Neither of us says a word.

Eventually, he pulls away.

“I need to shower.” His voice is gruff.

I press my lipsto his throat before I let him go.

On his workbench, thin strips of wood are laid out, with a row of stars marked out on each. Next to the jig saw, three stars lie finished. Each is the size of my palm, with gently rounded points and a perfect, miniature star cut out of the centre. A tiny hole has been punched near the top of one of the points.

Charlie’s stars. He’s marked out dozens of them.

The door to his bedroom and his en-suite bathroom have both been left ajar. I set one of the finished stars next to Charlie’s teddies on his pillow and undress.

He looks around when I open the shower cubicle, steam shrouded like an ancient king.

“Can I join you?” I ask, my voice scratchy.

I’ve imagined his hands on my body, slippery with soap, imagined him touching every secret corner of me. When I’m alone and my hands trace the path I dream of him taking, I swell with desire and shudder with release.

But his hands on me trace love, not passion.

“I fell last night,” I say when they slide over my shoulder blades. “I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head.

“I ran,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”

We share his towel, a strange but perfect intimacy.

Our fingers are interlaced when we pad back to his bedroom.

His eyes come to rest on Charlie’s teddy, and his star.

“Charlie’s star.” I squeeze his hand.

He lifts a shoulder. “I want to make something bigger for the top of the tree. These are just ornaments, really.”

I turn to face him.

For the first time since last night, we kiss. With soft lips and hesitant tongues, we say what words cannot.

“Have you eaten?” He asks finally.

I shake my head, and suck in a sudden breath. “What time is it? Shit, I haven’t fed Peg!”

His chuckle rumbles through his chest. “We should definitely get him sorted first. We can order in.” He hesitates. “If you want company.”

“Jack.” I drop my forehead on his shoulder. “I want your company.”

“Okay. I don’t need to spend the night.”

When I look up, his eyes are dark.

“I want you to spend the night. I’ll—“ I sigh. “I’ll wake you up if I freak out again, instead of just getting out of bed.”

How is is possible to be naked, yet to feel vulnerable only because of my words?

For what feels like an eternity, his eyes hold mine.

His thumb feathers the line of my lips. “C’mon. Let’s go feed your cat before he calls the shelter and asks to go back to a place where he gets regular meals.”


	17. 3 December (part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So I was thinking of doing another team night at my house tonight?” Daniel says tentatively.
> 
> A vivid image of the little door labelled 3 swims into focus behind my eyes. Jack doesn’t know it yet, but I was hoping to hang up my hangups and open that door with him tonight. I open my mouth to find a suitable explanation, clamp it shut again.
> 
> “Tomorrow?” It’s the best I can muster at a moment’s notice.
> 
> Daniel's smile grows into a smirk. 
> 
> “Right.” He nods. “And judging by that blush on your cheeks, I’m not even going to bother asking Jack. Ooof! Hey!” He jerks back as my elbow connects with his ribs. His hands rise in surrender. “Tomorrow it is! Sheesh! Easy!”
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aargh! After a blissful holiday, tomorrow is back to work, which means much less time to tell Sam and Jack's story.
> 
> But I've made you all deal with dark times, and I didn't want to wait to let the first rays of light break through the clouds. So this is a partial chapter. But I hope it brings a smile.
> 
> xo

*Sam*

My cell phone rings on my desk, startling me. Reception down here isn’t great, and besides, everyone uses the base extensions.

The number scrolling across the screen is familiar, though.

I cancel the call and fire off my standard text response: _call back in 5, poor reception._

In the elevator on the way to the surface, I look back at the number.

Jack’s the one with the photographic memory, hard as he tries to hide the fact, but you have to become pretty good at pattern recognition in our line of work. And I’m certain this is the number I remember in his handwriting on the note wrapped around the bath bomb last night. But I called from my home phone.

A few benches are strategically placed around the dome of the mountain, allowing those who need it to see the sun while on a break. Usually, only a few juniors are up here, smoking. Sooner or later, all active officers at the SGC give it up. It’s pointless to take a craving off-world with you.

One of the sunny benches is already occupied today, though. I swing away without looking who it is, find a bench facing the other direction and punch redial.

“Hi, Sam?” Comes the answer after one ring.

I frown. “Kelsey?”

“No, it’s Akheela. I’m just using her phone.” She sounds apologetic.

A suspicion — a heartwarming suspicion — takes root. I smile.

“Akheela, did Jack ask you to check on me?”

“What? No. Why? Should he have? Are you all right?”

In that moment, in the late morning sunshine, I miss Janet with a stabbing force.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry. I’m just not sure how you got my number, if Jack didn’t give it to you.”

“Oh. He gave it to Kelsey. He said you may be able to help her with some self-defence moves.”

Alarm flicks a clammy tongue over my back. “Is she in trouble?”

“No, no. That’s just why he gave her your number. You asked how she had it.”

“Ah.” _Slow down your brain, Sam._ But, of course, it races on again, galvanised by a good night’s sleep. A great night’s sleep, if I admit it to myself. The smell of his skin, the warmth of his hands on my back, lulled me into a cocoon of safety and dreams. So different from the night before, thank God.

“I thought she didn’t know my name.” My brain wasn’t going to let that one go, even if it’s more amusing than concerning. Jack trusted her. I can, too.

A hearty guffaw comes across the phone at me.

“Shall I tell you how your number’s saved? Silver Fox’s Kick-Ass Girl.”

I can’t suppress a giggle. “Oh, please can I tell him that?”

“I think he overheard her calling him that already, when he phoned to ask if he should give you the calendar, considering your dad.”

I don’t deserve this man. Today, in the sunlight, the thought fills me with awe, not guilt. But I’m still not sure I’ll ever get used to being the one General Jack O’Neill builds gifts for.

“Sam, I wanted to apologise. For assuming he had, you know… Kels and I have both had bad experiences and I just … go there.”

“It’s wonderful that you cared, Akheela.”

She pauses. “Okay. As long as you weren’t offended.”

I can hear her sucking in a breath.

“Was he right? About you being able to kick his ass? Being able to teach Kels how to do that?”

“I’m not a trained instructor.” But as I start to protest, I find a smile growing at the thought of helping Kelsey feel more confident. After all, she did the same for me, apparently, even if I messed up on day two.

“I could show her a few self-defence moves, though.”

“You could? Could I come too?”

“Of course! I owe both of you a thank you, anyway.”

“Awesome. Thanks, Sam. Um. Neither of us are working Saturday. I don’t know if that’s okay for you?”

“Saturday afternoon is perfect. I’ll text you my address. I’ve got a lawn you can practice throwing assailants to the floor on without damaging them too much.”

A shadow blocks the sun on my back as I disconnect the call.

Daniel eases onto the bench next to me.

“You doing better today?” He asks gently.

I nod. I was deluded if I thought he and Teal’c wouldn’t notice my mood yesterday.

“Good. We were worried about you.”

Gratitude wells in my heart, warm as the autumn sunshine. For years, I thought of myself as an outsider. Yet here I am, surrounded by care. I take his hand, squint my eyes to see his face against the sun.

“Thank you, Daniel.”

He gives that smile that makes ninety percent of the world — man and woman alike — melt.

“So I was thinking of doing another team night at my house tonight?” He says tentatively.

A vivid image of the little door labelled 3 swims into focus behind my eyes. Jack doesn’t know it yet, but I was hoping to hang up my hangups and open that door with him tonight. I open my mouth to find a suitable explanation, clamp it shut again.

“Tomorrow?” It’s the best I can muster at a moment’s notice.

His smile grows into a smirk.

“Right.” He nods. “And judging by that blush on your cheeks, I’m not even going to bother asking Jack. Ooof! Hey!” He jerks back as my elbow connects with his ribs. His hands rise in surrender. “Tomorrow it is! Sheesh! Easy!”

I roll my eyes at him. “What are you doing out here, anyway? Tell me being ascended hasn’t made you take up smoking.”

“Nah. Made me miss the sunshine, though,” he comments as we head back towards the spiral staircase that leads to the top of the elevator shaft.

He doesn’t comment when I punch the button for the level of Jack’s office rather than my lab, just tips his head with a gloating smirk when the door slides open at his level.

“Come.”

Jack’s response to my knock on his office door sends a shock of heat through me. Maybe tonight I should tell him what his voice does to me.

“Carter, hey.” His face softens when he looks up from the sheaf of papers in his hand and sees me.

“Hi, Sir. Am I interrupting?”

“Well, yes. I have to make the life altering decision about whether the toilets should be painted olive drab or camo khaki this year. Serious stuff.” He widens his eyes melodramatically. “RESCUE ME” he mouths.

I have to duck my head to hide my grin. I know he’s actually dealing with decisions about deployment and off-world resources, that virtually decision he makes lays the outcome of a person’s life on his shoulders. People tell me my career is heading there. If that ever happens, I know who my role model will be. I will spend my command emulating his humanity.

“I have, um, two favours to ask, Sir.”

And they are. They are both favours.

“Okay.” His face is impassive.

“I was wondering if I could talk to my dad. I know he thought the tests Dr Jamieson did would change nothing.”

My fingers have twisted themselves into a knot. I stare at them as I finish.

“I think it would help him to know that I accept that.”

I hear his chair creaking as he stands.

Every angle of his office is covered by cameras. We can’t give anything away. My eyes stay glued to my fingers as I hear him walking closer.

“I know it’s an extra gate activation, but —“ I start.

“But when we ran his tests, we knew there’d be a second activation to tell him his results.” His hand settles softly on my shoulder. “I’m sure Walter can squeeze ya in this afternoon.”

“Thank you.”

I want to look at him. But I’m sure the cameras will see the the love in my eyes.

His fingers squeeze lightly at the fabric of my shirt. “And the second thing?”

“I wondered if you wanted to come for dinner tonight.”

—oOo—

The gate whirls into life and the face of Shamon, one of the Tok’ra gate operatives I trained just a few days ago, appears on our screen.

“Colonel Carter, hello!”

“Hi Shamon. How is your painting going?”

The young man flushes. “I started a new portrait last night, Colonel. Of the plains of Zafari in the Spring.” Belatedly, he notices Jack at my elbow. “Oh, uh, good day, uh…”

“General O’Neill,” I prompt helpfully. “He’s the command—“

Jack’s hand waves between me and the camera. “He’s just a guy who’s about to go have some cake with his afternoon coffee, while you chat to your dad. I hear they have chocolate today.”

Somehow, he always manages to look thrilled when he thinks about chocolate cake. I make a mental note to buy some for tonight.

“Say, Carter, you know how to shut this thing down when you’re done, right?” He asks it casually. As if we didn’t hack the code together several years ago when alien armbands made us break all the rules.

“Yes, Sir.” I keep my voice and my face neutral.

“Good.” He turns casually to Walter. “Merriman, can I interest you in cake?”


	18. 3 December (part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My phone beeps a new message at me while I’m halfway to the cashier with the chicken, herbs, white wine, fresh pasta, salad and garlic bread for dinner.
> 
> There’s a little blue dot next to Jack’s name that makes my heart bounce the way the three dots do when he types.
> 
> \- Hey, Carter. Could ya pass the phone to Peg for a second, please? I need to ask him what I can bring for dinner.
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

Dad looks less tired than the last time I saw him. That thought sparks a tiny flame of hope in me, no matter how irrational.

“Hey kiddo,” he smiles his greeting. “Are you all alone today, or are the others just hiding from the camera?”

I grin in response. I should have known he’d pick up on that.

“Actually, I hear the chocolate cake in the commissary today is excellent. General O’Neill couldn’t resist it and he asked Walter on a date with him.”

“Hmm. Only because you were busy.”

My mouth drops open. “Dad!” I gasp.

His eyes sparkle with all the mischief I remember from our time working together over the past four years. I never knew my dad like this before. As a colleague. As a friend.

“Oh, relax, Sam, you’re safe. Walter only has eyes for you.”

“DAD! You know gate communications are recorded, right?”

“You can play that back to him, if you want,” he shrugs, his grin tucking his dimples deep into his cheeks. I get why people say we look so alike, when he smiles like this.

“What are they feeding you and Selmak?” I bluster. “Marijuana?”

His smile softens. His head tips sideways. God, I’m going to miss him.

I twist my head away before he can see the emotion reflected in my eyes.

“Sammy.” His voice is gentle as a hug. “I assume you’re calling because of my test results.”

I nod. Fold my arms tightly around my chest. Unfold them. Steeple my fingers on the table.Look up at the ceiling. Bite my lip. Nothing stops the tears that well in my eyes.

“We spoke to Bra’tak and Thor, too. And we’ve looked at the burial rites of the pharaohs.”

My words dry up. I can’t bring myself to say there’s nothing we can do to help.

“Did they tell you the end is peaceful, and painless? And nothing at all like the agony of dying of cancer that you saved me from when you introduced me to your life, and to the Tok’ra?” Dad’s voice is as gentle as his words.

I squeeze my mouth into a thin line to nod; swipe at a tear. It’s pointless. The next one only takes its place.

“I…” I heave out a breath. “I wanted to tell you that—“

I break off. How can I put this into something as mundane as a sentence?

“I wanted to tell you that I’ll miss you every day. That I wouldn’t be okay with this if you lived to be seven hundred rather than seventy. But that I will stop fighting it, if that’s what you want me to do.”

Dad gets that frown that tents his eyebrows up in the middle of his forehead. The frown that says _how could it take you so long to see?_

“Thank you for telling me that, Sam. I am happy, and at peace. I want you to be, too.”

For a long moment, the only sound is my halting breath, labouring around the emotion in my throat.

“Can I ask you to do something else for me?”

His words are so enigmatic, they draw my eyes back to him.

“Don’t let rules stand in your way, Sam. You can still have everything you want.”

His eyes bore into me, and I want to break down and tell him. Tell him everything. About how he was right about Jonas. About how the one man I’m not supposed to love is the sun in my life, and the glue that’s putting my shattered pieces back together.

“I do, Dad,” is all I can say on a recorded line.

His smile is sad. “I’d like to come home on the 22nd, Sam, if that’s okay? Spend the days before Christmas with Mark and Claire and the kids. And Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with you.”

“You don’t want to do a family Christmas?” _One last family Christmas,_ I should say, but I can’t. I won’t.

He lifts one side of his mouth. “I get a free pass now, I believe. I’ve never agreed with Mark’s parenting. And his kids are exhausting, obnoxious little creatures as a result. No, I’m looking forward to a quiet lunch and a good scotch in front of the fire. You’ll make your mom’s Brussels sprouts, I trust.”

I sniff back a laugh.

“Of course. If I don’t, you’d be an exhausting, obnoxious creature.”

“It’s less than four weeks away, Sammy. I’ll see you soon.”

He’s talking to me the way he did when he used to go away for work when I was four. I learnt to count so I could track the days he was away from home.

I squeeze my eyes shut.

“I love you, Dad.”

“I love you too, kiddo. G’bye.”

I’m grateful to have something to do, to be able to focus on shutting down the gate and logging the call. I should leave when it’s done. But I can’t bear the thought of the people I’d cross in the corridors, the pitying looks. I sink into Walter’s chair and drop my head on my arms.

Their returning footsteps slow when they enter the room. I snap guiltily to standing keeping my face turned as far away from them as possible. I dare not wipe my cheeks. Maybe the lights won’t pick up the tear tracks.

“Carter, c’mere.” In three strides, Jack has crossed the floor, and pulled me into a bear hug. His hands stay carefully on my shoulders. A gesture of friendship that borders on too close, but doesn’t cross a line.

“He’s your father. You’re allowed to be upset.”

Walter’s hand comes to rest on my arm, and for the second time today, despite the grief, I’m surrounded by belonging.

_I do, dad. I do have everything I want. I have more than I ever dreamed of._

When I make it back to my lab, a giant slice of chocolate cake is waiting next to my computer.

—oOo—

My phone beeps a new message at me while I’m halfway to the cashier with the chicken, herbs, white wine, fresh pasta, salad and garlic bread for dinner.

There’s a little blue dot next to Jack’s name that makes my heart bounce the way the three dots do when he types.

_\- Hey, Carter. Could ya pass the phone to Peg for a second, please? I need to ask him what I can bring for dinner._

I huff out a giggle.

 _\- Yo, Dad. Whathup?_ For a second, I wonder about the spelling. Will he understand that Peg’s lisping?

_\- Hey, lil buddy. Listen, I need ya. I’m in Wholefoods and I have no idea what to bring to a vegan dinner. A bouquet of broccoli? An arrangement of artichokes? Any chance you could sneak a peek at what Mom’s cooking and give me a hint?_

A throat clears meaningfully behind me. The line has moved on without me noticing.

“Sorry!” I hurry forward three paces.

_\- Actually, some grilled artichokes and some bacon would probably make what she has planned taste better, if that’s okay?_

_\- Gotcha._

I’ve imagined him in my life in so many ways. Appearing in the locker room after a gym workout, sweat glistening on his muscles, and crowding me against the cold metal with his heat; opening the shower door in my bathroom and stepping in, sipping the droplets of water from my nipples as his long fingers find the heat between my thighs; waking up on a lazy, sun-drenched Saturday surrounded by his scent. But this, this is better than anything I could make up.

“Can I give you a bag for this?”

I flash the checkout clerk a smile so broad she frowns in confusion and looks at the bag dangling from her fingers.

“Um, I do have to charge you for it…” she peters out.

“Yes. Yes, please, I’ll take a bag,” I beam at her. “Thank you.”

He’s brought beer and champagne, in addition to the grilled artichokes and bacon. He unpacks the paper bag and straightens the sides carefully so that the opening is a perfect rectangle. Whistling nonchalantly, he sets the bag on its side on the floor and steps back.

From the other end of the kitchen, two wide golden eyes swivel to the inviting darkness. Peg’s rump rises half an inch into the air, wiggles sharply from side to side, and he releases like an arrow from a bow, thudding into the bag; a cheetah on the hunt.

Jack crosses his legs at the ankles and leans back against the counter.

“Even better than a box, isn’t it, bud?” He comments.

I straighten up from stashing the bacon out of claw reach in the fridge.

“Champagne? Again? If I didn’t know you were a man of integrity, Sir, I’d say you were trying to get me drunk.”

Along with the shrug of his shoulders, he opens his arms, and I walk straight into them, wrapping my hands around his waist, laying my head against his shoulder so I can watch Peg’s vigorous attack on the bag.

“Hmmm. If — hypothetically — I were to get you drunk, would you take advantage of me?” he asks saucily.

His lips feather softly over my hair.

“But no,” he continues. “The champagne is meant to go with last night’s gift. And maybe also tonight’s. I just couldn’t figure out how to make the tree big enough to hold two bottles of it without losing its shape.”

I close my eyes. I don’t deserve him. But nobody does. No-one deserves this level of thoughtful love. I still don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. But tonight, tonight it buoys me up rather than making me feel guilty.

“Jack.” I turn to face him. “Will you spend Christmas with Dad and me? I, I want him to know.”

He looks at me silently. A slow smile rises to smoulder in his eyes. He nods, the smallest of movements before his lips fit themselves to mine.

Behind us, a howl of distress and a thudding crash rips through the room.

Pegasus is flinging himself around in an attempt to escape the paper bag, which is flapping more and more noisily with every frantic movement. But it's resolutely attached to him, because his head is caught in one of the handles.

I catch his twisting, heaving form, wedge him between my knees and attempt to lift the handle over his head, but every gesture increases his panic.

“Scissors,” I hear Jack’s voice, quiet, focused. We’re back on mission, speaking in half thoughts, completely attuned to each other.

“Second drawer.” I don’t have to raise my voice above a murmur.

“Got them. Undamaged ear.”

Of _course_. Of course our cat would have terror layered on terror if he feels something wrapped around the spot he’ll only let Jack touch. My heart fills with love for this little creature who has had to endure so much pain.

Reaching carefully around his heaving chest, I nod to Jack and gently fold his head towards me, exposing the good ear. In one smooth movement, Jack clips the sturdy handle and pulls the bag away.

Peg scrambles for freedom, a desperation of tooth and nail, and tears into the darkened lounge.

“Shit. I really didn’t think it would scare him.” Jack pulverises what remains of the bag in his fists and slams it into the bin.

“You had no way of knowing that he’d do that.”

He shakes his head, his mouth a tight line of self-reproach.

“I should have thought to cut off the handles.”

I wonder if this is what it’s like to be a parent; constantly thinking of things that will bring your child joy, soaring on their laughter, then plunging into sadness with every tear they shed.

I pop the lid on a bottle of beer and place it in his hands.

“Go. Be with him. I’ll start dinner, and I’ll bring you some bacon to give him as a peace offering.”

It’s hard to find them at first, when I pad into the lounge with the plate of cubed, fried bacon. Then I see them, on the floor next to the Christmas tree, Jack sitting with his back propped against the wall, Peg curled into a tiny ball on his lap, his head tucked against his stomach and hidden under his paws.

He gives me an apologetic smile, but makes no attempt to move.

I switch on one of the standard lamps, raising the room out of darkness and into gentle light, and set the bacon down next to him. Still, our cat doesn’t stir.

I grab another beer from the kitchen, set it down on the floor next to them.

“Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. I’ll bring it here, okay?”

People may disagree. I’m sure our grandkids will roll their eyes and call me lame.

But one day when I’m eighty, when they ask me about the most romantic moment in my life, it won’t be the big gestures, the rings and dances and fancy restaurants I’ll talk about. It will be sitting on the floor of my lounge, bathed in soft light, surrounded by the scent of the needles from our first Christmas tree, sharing pasta and beer while a ball of orange and white fur on Jack’s lap gradually forgets his fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Damnit! I tried SO hard to make this chapter steamy, but all they wanted was cuteness and romance!
> 
> I will give Jack a serious talking to tonight, so he knows it's time to give us less of the slow and more of the burn.  
> Let's hope he listens this time!  
> xo


	19. 4 December

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We drift without words, without moving.
> 
> He offers a shy smile when he sees me looking at him. 
> 
> I drop my head against his chest and breathe him in, the scent of his skin, the sweet musk of our sex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @XWingKC, thank you xo

*Sam*

I wake before five, the world hushed around us, so silent the occasional early morning car echoes in a whisper across the suburb. Between my body and Jack’s, our cat stretches an orange paw luxuriously and lets out a contented sigh.

Our cat. I’ll never think of him any other way.

Warmth and want flood through me for this gentle man, his face faded to softness as he sleeps. I want to wrap him in my love, to feel his body moulding to mine.

I reach under Peg’s bottom and lift it into the air, trying to shift it over my body so that we can swop places.

A yellow eye opens and stares suspiciously at me.

“Oh, come on, Peg. You got a whole night of cuddling him. Give your mom a turn?” I whisper.

Pegasus chirps a bad-tempered meow. But I’m bigger than him. By the time his back half is draped uncomfortably over my hip, he gives up with a disgusted sigh and stalks to the foot of the bed.

I scoot carefully closer, aching for the feel of his skin, but not wanting to wake him.

As I settle against his chest, he folds around me, his arm on my waist pulling me closer, his top leg tucking between my knees.

He groans, drowsy sound of approval that reaches right to my core. Stubble tickles my neck. His lips press into the hollow above my collarbone.

“Morning, Mom.” His voice is a low thrum, a note that washes fire through me.

I moan and arch my neck into his touch.

His lips open, his tongue draws a slow line across my skin, igniting every nerve in my body. His teeth graze the rise of bones under my shoulder, pushing the strap of my tank top down.

My breath catches with the rush of my desire.

I pull him closer, thrilling at the friction of fabric against my breasts, at the heat of his erection radiating through the the thin layers of our shorts.

I want him to possess me, to own me, to blur the lines between my body and my love.

I push into him, roll on top of him, angle my hips to get him closer.

His mouth is open, his eyes boring into me as he drags his hands down my back, under my top, lifting it over my head. His fingers hold firmly onto my ribs as his thumbs find my nipples, circle them, tease them into aching points.

I open my legs to straddle him, to feel him pushing against my sex. His hips rock forward, slowly, deliberately, moving on me.

With fire in his eyes, he pulls my shoulders down, kissing a path from my shoulder to my breast, playing his tongue over my nipple until I whimper and writhe for release.

My hands find the waistband of his boxers, my fingers shaking with need.

“Yes,” he whispers, lifting his hips into me as they slide down his legs. His hands mirror mine, sliding my shorts over the swell of my butt, cupping the bare cheeks to pull my wet heat against his naked length.

With a raw sigh, his mouth finds my other breast. His movements become harder, more insistent, nipping, scraping, every sensation shocking straight through me until I can’t control the waves that rise and crest and tear me apart with ecstasy. I hear my voice saying his name, I feel my fingers pressing his head to my chest, but I’m floating on liquid fire. He continues to rock against me, slow, firm movements that send fresh shocks through me, even as I drift into softness in his arms.

I want more. I want more of him against me. I never want to stop feeling him.

“Jack,” I tip my hips forward, sighing at his intake of breath. “I want you.”

My hand finds his pulsing erection. I want this. I want him. I love him. I want him to love me. My hand barely trembles as I guide him closer to my entrance.

“Sam.” He shudders as the head touches me, but rolls me over, our bodies separating.

Then he’s back, his hands on my body, his leg between my thighs, eyes smoky black on mine. He kisses me with all the hunger I feel. But a cold pebble in my gut tugs at my mind. If he wants me, if he loves me, why did he pull away?

The tightness climbs inexorably up my spine. I open my shaking hand around him.

“Sam, Sam please don’t let me go.” His hand surrounds mine on his shaft. “I want you, too. I want you so fucking much. Please.”

His mouth finds mine, delving deeper, slower. The fingers of his left hand caress my lips. He pulls back his head to look at me.

He moves his hips, his cock sliding in my hand, his fingers entering my mouth.

I don’t understand. I don’t understand why he wants me like this, and not the way other men do. But as my eyes close, his voice pulls them back to him.

“I love you. God, I love you.” He slides his fingers down my body, trailing moisture, rekindling the fire in my skin.

His hand slips between my legs and find my entrance.

Brown eyes look into my soul.

“Sam, tell me to stop,” he breathes.

And the pieces fall into place. Wonder and love flare and curl through my chest. It’s not because he doesn’t love me. He’s doing this for me.

I lift my hips to meet him.

“Please don’t stop.” I breathe.

One finger slides inside me, out again, circling my entrance with my own slick heat.

Again, his eyes bore into me. His lips are parted.

“Sam?” His lips form the silent question.

“Please,” I whisper.

Two fingers enter me, circling slowly against the tightness that threatens to clamp down. His hips rock into my hand with the same slow rhythm as his fingers. His lips feather over my neck, my chest.

There is no pain. I feel no pain.

I tilt into his hand, and a sigh escapes him. Slowly, while his fingers continue to move inside me, his thumb strokes my clit.

“Oh.” I can’t stop the moan that falls from my lips. Don’t want to. With every stroke, on me, inside me, the fear falls away, the fire grows.

But I can’t look away. Can’t look away from his eyes, his mouth, his wondering smile.

“Jack,” I moan louder, arching into every secret place his hands can reach. My hips, my hand, my mouth, they all draw him closer.

“God, Sam, I can’t hold…” He jerks in my hand, hisfingers jerk inside me, convulsing with his climax, dragging me closer, closer, over, aching, falling, pulsing. Home.

I’m home.

In his arms, in his love, with his fingertips possessing me, caressing the final waves of bliss out of my shaking body, I find the place my heart belongs.

We drift without words, without moving.

He offers a shy smile when he sees me looking at him.

I drop my head against his chest and breathe him in, the scent of his skin, the sweet musk of our sex.

A sudden, mad urge to giggle shakes my shoulders.

“Sam?”

He tenses with concern, but I push closer to him. I’m not ready to lose his touch.

But the giggles only intensify.

“Sorry,” I gulp. “I just. Vegans eat well.”

His chest rumbles with a dry chuckle.

“Toldya.”

When my laughter subsides, he draws his thumb gently over my clit, and my whole body arcs into his touch, tender as it is.

I’m on fire for him.

“How do you feel?” He asks quietly.

“Like I’ve come home.”

I want to look in his eyes, to show him my truth, but the emotion chasing through me will turn to tears if I see him right now. Instead, I turn my cheek, press it to his chest and listen to his heart.

“Was there any pain?”

My heart lurches in my chest.

“No! No. It was wonderful.You — the things you make me feel.”

Slowly, he uncoils and pulls me into his arms.

When my alarm sounds, we groan in unison.

“What would happen if we called in sick and just stayed here all day?” I sigh.

“Well. If you called in sick, P-327-9 wouldn’t get its gate patch and the world may end in a ball of fire. If I call in sick, the base would heave a sigh of relief and chef would be able to make his own decision about whether to serve chips or mash at lunch,” he grumbles.

I roll on top of him, pin him with my arms.

“Stop saying that. You are the best commander I’ve ever served under. If I ever get a chance to command a base, I would strive to be just like you.”

The little frown that lines his face every day crawls back between his eyes.

But he pulls me against him for a fast, fierce hug.

“I’ll go put the coffee on,” I say, fighting the fresh wave of emotion threatening to drown me.

We’re both more composed when he wanders into the kitchen, showered and dressed.

I take a final gulp of my coffee and set it on the counter after handing his mug to him.

“I’d better go shower, too, or I’ll be late.”

He pads behind me to the bedroom, cradling his coffee in one hand.

“I, um, broke the rules.” He sounds like a schoolboy caught kissing a girl in the library.

The door marked 9 on my calendar-tree is open, and dangling from his fingers is a scrap of gossamer spring green. With a smile, I take it from him. It’s a pair of the most delicate panties, all scalloped edges and translucent lace.

He flushes. His fingertips trace the path of the lace in the palm of my hand.

“I want to think of it wrapped around you today, until I get to hold you again.”

We’re late for work. Only by a minute, but it’s enough to make Walter look pointedly at his watch when I stride in to check that all is still in order for my trip to install the patch.

I don’t care, though.

Under my BDUs, I’m wearing spring green lace. And in my heart, a memory of finally coming home.


	20. Softness in a hard world

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I set my glass on the bedside table and look at the little wooden door marked 4. I can see his hand holding the paintbrush that marked the numeral. I can feel it on my skin.
> 
> I wet my lips with my tongue and lift the latch.
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

I shouldn’t feel that drop of disappointment in my stomach when he isn’t there to greet me as I step back through the gate. This is my third, identical, routine mission to a friendly world. I faced no danger. And he has an entire base to run.

I shouldn’t feel the hollowness as I smile and wave at Walter, surreptitiously checking to see if his office door is open. But I do. And a voice that sounds exactly like my own, a voice I _hate,_ takes a seat in my mind and opens her fat mouth.

_This is the start of the slippery slope,_ she cautions, wise beyond her years.

_First comes disappointment you can hide, then comes outright neediness. You’re not special, Sam. You’re one of seventy-nine members of his staff._

I hand my tools and weapons in, sign the logs with a brittle, glassy smile, while she speaks relentlessly on.

_You’ve caught his eye. For now. He’s already given you better sex than you’ve ever had in your life. Can’t that be enough? If you keep this up, you’ll do something stupid to get him to pay attention to you at work, and someone will find out about you._

A drop of icy fear lands on my neck and slides inexorably down my spine. With a shiver, I yank open my lab door.

A slip of paper is tucked under my laptop.

_Carter,_

_Had to head to DC for a meeting. Nothing to worry about, but I’m afraid I may not be able to feed Peg on Saturday night as I said I would._

_Apologise to him for me?_

Shit. Shit. Shit. We never discussed the weekend. He’s going to be gone for a while and I’m not supposed to know why.Has someone already found out? Seen his truck at my house?

A bitter wave of gall washes through my gut.

Forcing my hand to stay steady, I read on.

_Speaking of Peg, do you maybe have an old phone lying around that you can give him? I feel bad to always have to call you and ask to speak to him._

The bottom falls out of my world. He wants me to get a separate number. We’ve been talking about dinner — who the fuck am I kidding, we’ve been _flirting_ — on numbers the Air Force knows about.

I’ve cost him his career.

I have to sprint to make it to the bathroom before the bile pours out of my mouth.

“Hey, Sam, are you okay?”

I virtually walk into Daniel while wiping the cold sweat from my cheeks on my way back to my lab to collect my things.

“You look awful. Can I call Dr Jamieson?”

“No! No, Daniel. I’m fine. I ate something last night that didn’t agree with me.”

It flashes at me, sharp as strobe lights. My moans. His fingers in my mouth.

I drag my palm across my face to erase the memory of the happiness that may have undone it all.

“Are you sure? I think she’d prefer to check you out.”

“Daniel! I said I’d be fine!”

He raises his hands in surrender, but there’s no humour on his face.

_And this is how it begins,_ the voice in my head snides. _You alienate your friends. If you really cared about him as much as you claim, you would never have kissed him. Selfish._

Another wave of nausea crashes through me.

I force myself to look Daniel in the face.

“I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m just not feeling great. I just need to get home and into bed.” I heave out a sigh. “I’m sorry to miss team dinner.”

The words taste like a prophecy of disaster. If we never have another team dinner, it will be because of my desperate need for love.

“Of course.” Daniel’s voice is filled with care I don’t deserve. “I was just coming to suggest we postpone anyway. Jack’s had to fly off to DC for some national emergency. Sam, can I give you a lift home? You really don’t look good.”

Somehow, I manage to make my way back to my lab to collect my laptop with Jack’s note hidden inside it, to the locker room to change and pick up my car keys, without breaking down. Daniel reluctantly leaves me at the elevator, after extracting a promise to check in with him later.

I take a detour to a corner store I don’t usually visit and buy a simcard, airtime and a pack of cigarettes with cash. Two blocks from my house, I drop the cigarettes out of the car window, next to the park where the neighbourhood teens hang out. Not that anyone would care enough to investigate my movements after seeing the messages on our other phones. But nobody who works with me would expect me to buy cigarettes. I hope it’s a brand the kids like to smoke, at least.

Even Peg quietens down the second I pick him up. As if my dread radiates through him. Rather than gyrating with joy as he usually does when I come home, he quietly presses his head into the crook of my neck and lets me carry him into the bedroom, not even protesting when I bend over to get my old phone and its charger from the bottom of the wardrobe.

I have things to do, and that keeps me going. Inserting the sim into the phone, plugging it in to charge, waiting for the screen to light up, loading airtime.

When I know the phone is able to receive a call, I lift the handset of my landline, dial Jack’s cell, let it ring three times, replace the handset in the cradle with numb fingers.

Then I sink to the ground next to the bed and let the trembling overtake me.

My landline rings before the world stops spinning.

“Carter,” I croak.

“Hey.”

His voice is velvet in the shattered glass of my world.

“I have a number,” I speak through lips that don’t belong to me.

“You got my note.” I can hear his relaxed smile. _How can he be so calm?_

“I got one, too. I’m calling from it now. D’ya want to take it down?” He drawls.

I nod, before realising.

“Ready,” I whisper.

With clumsy fingers, I key his number into the charging phone.

“Thanks, Sam.”

A hundred meanings to his words race through my brain.

“Listen, I gotta head back in. I told them I had a crisis with my cat to deal with, but that hasn’t bought me too much time. I — wanted to be with you tonight, not in some infernal international relations posturing meeting. Not that they need me. They have forty-nine other blokes wanting to weigh in. Honestly, Carter, you’d be better at this than me. You’d have far more patience, for one. And the room could use some feminine tact.”

Relief tingles in my toes, climbs up my legs, floods my belly.

“Oh.” It’s all I can bring myself to say.

“Listen.” He suddenly sounds schoolboy nervous. “Um. You don’t have to. At all. But. I kinda wanted to see you in today’s gift..” I can hear him swallowing. “It’s not the kinda thing I want to ask you to do on a phone the Air Force knows about. But. If you want. Only if you want. Send me a message to tell me if you like it?”

Peg’s head worms between my elbow and my knee, dislodging the headset of the landline that I still cradle against me minutes after he rang off to rejoin his meeting.

A meeting with fifty people.

Not a tribunal.

I pick the cat up and plant a loud smack on the top of his head, making him squirm with disgust.

“Get used to it, kiddo,” I tease, giddy with sudden joy. “Your mom’s a kisser. C’mon. Let’s get you some food and me a glass of wine, after all that angst.”

I set my glass on the bedside table and look at the little wooden door marked 4. I can see his hand holding the paintbrush that marked the numeral. I can feel it on my skin.

I wet my lips with my tongue and lift the latch.

A cascade of pale blue tumbles to the floor.

Crouching down, I tug out the note still wedged inside the compartment.

_That morning at the cabin,_ his words spool across the scrap of paper, _the sky and your eyes were this colour. I’ll never be able to look at the dawn sky without seeing you._

The bundle on the floor is a satin nightdress, the colour of the sky in the moment before the sun rises. Its cut is simple, so plain I would have picked it for myself. A gentle V for the neck, a narrower middle and a scalloped hem that ends around mid-thigh. No embellishment. No lace. Two delicate straps, half an inch wide, gliding over each shoulder. They're so subtle, but the double straps raise the piece from plain to elegant.

I slide the fabric between my fingers, marvelling at the liquid smoothness with which the satin drapes and folds.

I catch the straps and hold it up in front of me.

The last detail sends a tingle over my skin.

The smooth side of the fabric faces in. The thrill of satin slipping over skin is meant for my body.

I’ve never done this, I think as I undress and slide the nightdress on. I’ve never taken photos of myself in lingerie. I’ve barely even worn it.

But somehow, it makes me feel beautiful.

Sucking in a deep breath, I hold the phone at arm’s length above my head and press the shutter.

The photo’s badly framed. The right side of my head is chopped off, my legs are out of shot, the shadow of my arm falls across my body. And I’m chewing my lip in concentration, even though I’m grinning like a goofball.

But by some trick of the light, my eyes are the exact colour of the two delicate straps that run over each shoulder.

Before I have a chance to lose my nerve, I hit send.

_\- I love it xo_ I type quickly, before fleeing to the kitchen to make dinner.

I have articles to read, and a new one to review, but I can’t bring myself to think tonight. Instead, I curl up on the couch under a blanket, with my old phone next to me, and watch reruns of ER before heading to bed,

The beep of the message tone startles me awake. It’s after midnight.

His message is a single line that pulls at my heart.

_\- You are softness in a hard world._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I confess, I wasn't expecting Jack to have to leave today. But even on the other side of the world, my heart aches for the turmoil our friends in the US are facing right now.
> 
> If only Jack were there, he'd set things right.
> 
> If only Jack were there...
> 
> To everyone hurting today wherever in the world you find yourself, I offer this as a breath of respite from the madness.  
> An instant of blue just before the sunrise.
> 
> Better days will come.  
> Stay safe.  
> Stay you.  
> The hard world needs your softness.  
> xo


	21. 5 December: Desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I grab my phone off the edge of the bath, balance the ducky on the exposed skin just above the bubbles that cover my breasts, and wink as I take a photo.
> 
> '- Desire duck and I say hi!' I caption the photo before hitting send.
> 
> I set it — her — back down on the edge of the bath and relish the cold, tart bubbles of champagne as they burst over my tongue.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An image from "Space Milkshake" inspired today's chapter. Oh, and a sexy little duckling called Desire.
> 
> Happy weekend, unicorns.
> 
> I hope you find softness in the world today.  
> xo

*Sam*

Friday night alone never used to feel lonely.

And it’s not that I’m even _lonely_ , as such. I’ve spent most of my life being lonely in other people’s company.

No, this feeling is closer to looking at a breathtaking sunset when I’m off-world at Thanksgiving and missing home.

I look up from the paper I’m reviewing, staring at the fork piled with salad hovering halfway to my mouth, as if it were the origin of the revelation.

I miss him.

My old phone, the one with the number only he has, lies silent and dark on the dining room table. But that’s no surprise. From the snippets I picked up over the years, meetings that require commanders to drop everything and run to DC are 22 hour-a-day affairs.

And strangely, I don’t feel needy. I miss him with the glowing certainty of being one half of a team. I’ve never felt this way about anyone.

I push my plate aside and pick up my phone.

I know he won’t understand the significance. They are only three words, after all, that we all say too often, to mean too many things.

Still.

 _\- I miss you_ I type, and return to my dinner and the article with lightness in my chest.

The article is awful.

It’s not the premise that is flawed, but the author leaps from assumption to conclusion like a character in a video game.

Most reviewers would simply reject it for publication. But I remember the terror I felt when I submitted my first article for peer review, the terrible feeling of baring my heart to the wolves. I can’t just reject it if that action could crush somebody’s dreams. So pretty soon, the page is filled with more of my writing than the author’s, and a headache is building between my eyes.

The phone’s ringtone sends a shock of excitement through me.

“Hi,” I try to give a nonchalant greeting, and end up sounding breathless and fifteen.

“Thank you for giving me the best two seconds of the past twenty four hours.”

His voice is tired, but I can hear the soft smile curling at the edges of his words.

They make my own smile bloom into a grin.

“I promise I last longer in person.”

His chuckle sounds exhausted.

“How is the meeting going?” I ask gently, glancing at my watch. It’s after nine.

He sighs, but hesitates to answer.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here, Carter.”

The vulnerability, the doubt in his tone, tears at my heart.

“Twenty-two hours of fucking politics and point scoring. I don’t know how Hammond survived without punching every single one of these self-important dicks in the throat.”

His anger is barely hidden beneath the insecurity.

I want to diffuse his anger with another joke, about Hammond getting enough practice not punching his star team to make meetings in DC easy, but something stops me.

There are rumours on the base that General Hammond had to beg him to take the post, that he refused over and over and actually carried a resignation letter in his pocket for the first three weeks of his command.

 _I miss you_ was a bigger confession for me to make than most people would understand.

Him telling me he feels out of place in this meeting carries equal weight.

“Jack. The fact that you’re angry is exactly why you’re needed there. General Hammond wanted you to take over from him — we all did — because you put the safety of the people in your command before anything. Even yourself. The outcome of this meeting will be better because you’re in it.”

I pause, uncertain if I’m saying too much, being patronising. He’s so quiet I have to strain to hear him breathing. Yet something pulls me ahead, for better or for worse.

“I miss you,” I say again. “I wish you were with me tonight. But I feel safer knowing you’re there.”

On the other end of the line, I hear him clearing his throat, and something that sounds like a sniff. His voice is scratchy when he speaks again.

“You home?” He asks. “Tell me you’re doing something fascinating like watching paint dry while I’m suffering through this.”

“Actually, I’m reviewing a paper on the formation of supermassive black holes and hating every second of it.”

“Ah, see, I feel better already.”

I can imagine his mouth quirking up at the corner.

“Have you opened today’s door?”

I suck in a breath. “Oh! No. I… I kind of like doing it with you.”

Again, the soft laughter comes across the line, and my heart lifts a little more. I can’t do much for him from here, but if I can bring him a minute of comfort, I will.

 _Softness in a hard world,_ he said last night. And if that’s what I can be, I will.

“Well, today’s is kinda a two person thing. But you could go for the one from the 3rd?”

“Um. Okay?” I’ve wandered into the bedroom and am looking at the little door.

He’s silent.

“You mean right now?” I ask, suddenly shy.

“Sure, why not?” He asks innocently.

And I can’t think of a reason.

There’s no note in the little compartment behind the door marked 3, just a rubber ducky, the type toddlers play with in the bath, but small enough to sit on the palm of my hand.

I take it out suspiciously.

“A duck?”

I can picture his smirk when he says: “Uh. huh. Just a duck. Squeeze its tail.”

The little toy buzzes to life the second I do, making me jump and scream like a girl.

His laugh sounds pleased.

“Squeeze it again.”

The frequency of vibration kicks up a notch.

“Jack, what the hell?”

“You aren’t scared of a duckling, are ya, Colonel? Go on, give it another squeeze.”

“What the—?” The tiny yellow plastic toy in my hand has started gyrating, the buzzing increasing and decreasing rhythmically. “Jack, how do I make it stop?”

“You ask it nicely.”

I can hear the amusement in every word, and a tiny part of my gut stutters at yet another boyfriend laughing at my inexperience. But it doesn’t matter. Because there is only warmth and affection in his tone. And no more anger. No more self-doubt. He can laugh at my ineptitude with vibrating farm creatures if that’s what it takes to bring softness to his world.

“Squeeze for three seconds. That should shut it up,” he says more quietly. “God, I wish I could hug you right now.”

“Me too, Jack.”

I hear people in the background.

“Listen, hon, I got to go. Say hi to Peg for me, okay?”

It’s the casual tone a husband would use on a business trip.

I understand why he’s doing it. It’s a cover. But the term of endearment wraps itself around my shoulders like a ray of Winter sun.

I can’t find my voice before the line disconnects.

The notes I make on the article become kinder and kinder. I add callouts when I agree with a statement, not only comments when I don’t. My shoulders ache and my eyes burn by the time I finish, but I hope the author will know the person they'll only ever know as Reviewer 2, is rooting for them.

I should get into bed. I’m ready to sleep. But my heart still floats on the current of our conversation.

On the spur of the moment, I draw a bath, pour a glass of the champagne he brought over on Wednesday night when we ended up comforting Peg instead, and pour a generous dollop of bubble bath into the water. I set my old phone, the glass, and the slightly terrifying duck on the edge and slide into the liquid velvet.

With the bubbles swirling around my collarbones and a large gulp of Champagne chilling me from the inside, I pick up the ducky and look it square in the eye.

“You make me very uncomfortable, you know that? Tiny as you are,” I confess to the creature’s smiling beak.

I huff out a deep sigh at its lack of response.

“I know. It’s not you. It’s me. I’ve just always been more of a … you know … hands on kind of person. Gadgets are for work.”

The diminutive duck smiles a silent challenge.

“Yeah. You’re right. It’s stupid. And I want to be more adventurous. I want to make Jack gasp, the way he does to me. Maybe you can help me with that, hey?”

An idea floats into my head.

_Softness in a hard world._

I may not know how to be sexy about being given a vibrator, but my duck and I can bring him a smile.

I grab my phone off the edge of the bath, balance the ducky on the exposed skin just above the bubbles that cover my breasts, and wink as I take a photo.

 _\- Desire duck and I say hi_ I caption the photo before hitting send.

I set it — her — back down on the edge of the bath and relish the cold, tart bubbles of champagne as they burst over my tongue.

My phone beeps faster than I expected.

With a flutter of excitement, I open his message.

_\- Desire Duck? Carter, no offence. But I’m naming our children._

I pull back my head, read the message again.

I don’t get the joke. Or didn’t he?

“Desire … duck …” I whisper to myself, trying to puzzle it out.

“Oh, crap!” I grab the phone.

_\- Crap! Desiré! I meant Des-ee-RAY!_

I watch the bouncing dots with flaming cheeks.

_\- Thank you, Sam. You made a bad day good._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I dedicate today's chapter to everyone who writes, whether papers on the formation on super massive black holes or fanfic or poetry, and is brave enough to offer it to the world.
> 
> Thank you for your courage.  
> Your words enrich us all.


	22. 6 December: Ma'am

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don’t stop moving until my arms are flung around his shoulders and my head is buried in his neck.
> 
> In the same second that I realise how impulsive that was, that he may have people with him, that he may not want me to show this much affection in front of strangers; in the instant I catch myself and try to shrink away, his arms lock me against him, lift me off the ground and sway me gently from side to side. His head drops forward and he breathes in deeply, as if inhaling me.
> 
> “Hey,” he whispers.
> 
> “Okay, you guys are nauseatingly adorable,” Kelsey grumbles from behind me, “but next time you could just ask me to move, Sam. Seriously.”
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For @Gwhite, who wondered aloud if maybe SOMEONE could bring Jack home... xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Sam*

Kelsey, Akheela and I are sipping coffee and munching Akheela’s homemade crunchies in the kitchen, chatting with the familiarity of old friends, despite the fact that we’ve only spoken once and exchanged a few messages about the time of our meeting today and what to wear.

The two girls seem to have decided to take me under their wings and our conversation makes me feel as if I’m the new recruit moving into their college dorm, despite the fact that I must be fifteen years their senior.

They move around each other with the easy affection of best friends who fell in love; not clinging, but sharing quick smiles and fond glances, little touches of fingertips to arm that are more intimate than kisses, yet don’t make me feel I’m intruding.

It makes me miss Jack with an ache that settles deep in my bones. I have no idea when he’ll be back, and I am proud to know that he is fighting for the SGC in whatever meeting he’s in, but I want the comfort of pressing my body to his chest, of his arms around me, of his scent and the steady beat of his heart.

“Jack didn’t have to clear out today. I wouldn’t have minded him seeing how ridiculous I look when I’m trying to fight off an attacker.” Kelsey says, taking a pensive bite of her cookie.

I shake my head.

“Oh, no, he’s out of town for work,” I say, adding before I can think: “It sucks.”

“You guys are adorable,” she chuckles. “I can’t tell which of you is more in love.”

Adorable is not a label I would have attached to either of us. But coming from her, with her wide green eyes and infectious grin, I’ll take it. She must see enough relationships, good and bad, to know.

“So how long have you guys known each other?” Akheela asks. She doesn’t seem any older than Kelsey, but she’s more reserved. She carries her body and her thoughts with careful poise. I wonder absently if she is a dancer. She has dreadlocks that reach to her waist and burnished skin. She would be breathtaking to watch on a stage.

I pull myself back into the conversation.

“More than eight years. Though being together is really, super new.”

“What was stopping you?” Kelsey throws out.

I open my mouth, take in a breath to speak, close it again.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell us.” Kelsey’s voice is gentle. Not apologetic, just accepting.

And, damn it, now I miss Janet, too.

I really should make an effort to make friends outside of work. Unlike Jonas and Pete, I know Jack won’t mind.

“No,” I counter. “Work, I guess.” _Though that hasn’t changed._ “And, well. I never thought I stood a chance with him.” I lift one shoulder and let it drop, examining the coffee in my mug.

“I know I haven’t seen this Jack, but I don’t think too many men are out of your league, Sam.” Akheela smiles.

I’m not used to compliments, so I steer the conversation away.

“How about you? How long have you guys been together?”

“Since freshers’ week, when we first met.” Kelsey steps closer to her girlfriend with a sparkle in her eyes. “She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. She had turquoise and purple dreads then. She looked like a butterfly.”

Akheela’s arm cinches Kelsey’s waist. “And her boyfriend was being a dick. So I pulled her onto the stage and kissed her for one of those stupid competitions they’re always doing at student parties. We won a bottle of tequila. And apparently I was a better kisser than her boyfriend.”

Kelsey sparkles with remembered happiness. “And the rest is history!” She finishes the story.

“And what do you do now, Akheela?” I’m relishing the warmth of the moment.

“Still studying,” she snorts. “I’m a sucker for punishment.”

“She’s doing her master’s in psychology.” Kelsey glows with pride.

“And Kels is studying, too. A master’s in creative writing. She’s going to be a famous novelist one day.”

“I guess you get some good stories from your clients at Forbidden Fruit,” I venture.

“Ugh. Honestly, it would be perfect for research if I wanted to write murder mysteries about sleaze bags. But I write romance.”

“She was so excited to finally meet a guy who was hero material, she called me the second Jack left the shop that night.” Akheela’s laughter is like bubbles of molten glass.

“Oh! That reminds me. I know you didn’t want payment for today. But I got you a little thank you.” Kelsey digs in her handbag and hands me a slim black tube.

“It’s the best lube there is, in my opinion. And it fits into your handbag.”

“Lu-lube.” I stammer.

“Sure. Don’t you? Oh. Sam.” Kelsey sets her mug down on the counter. “Every woman, _all_ of us, can benefit from lube. It takes away one of the biggest causes of pain. And it just feels lovely. Akheel and I use it all the time, even if there is no penetration. Girl’s best friend. Trust me.”

“I. Oh.” A memory flashes in front of my eyes. Jack’s fingers in my mouth, trailing moisture down my body. It was so sensual. And now I know why he did it.

I can feel the heat rising in my neck.

“Oh,” I breathe again. “Thank you.”

“Any time. At least the job has some perks!”

If she noticed my discomfort, she’s not letting on, chattering every bit as easily as before.

“And best thing about it, is it comes in flavours, too. I got you the unflavoured one for now because I don’t know what you and Jack like, but black cherry is my favourite.”

“Anyway,” Akheela cuts her off gently, “maybe we should stop eating our weight in cookies and go learn some self defence.”

Akheela moves like a dancer when practicing the moves I show them, too.

But Kelsey fights with fire that makes my stomach clench with recognition, asking for more and more advanced counters, mentioning specific scenarios she wants to be able to control.

And she takes instruction well. We’re onto intermediate moves in under an hour.

She’s just successfully pinned me to the floor on my stomach, with my right arm twisted up behind me and her knee resting on my lower back when I hear steps on the lawn behind me and his polite: “remind me not to piss you off, Kelsey.”

I move on instinct, flipping my left arm up to unbalance her, using her momentum to swing my right hand out of her grip, pivoting it to cushion her body as she tumbles forwards over me and sprawls on her back on the lawn.

I don’t stop moving until my arms are flung around his shoulders and my head is buried in his neck.

In the same second that I realise how impulsive that was, that he may have people with him, that he may not want me to show this much affection in front of strangers; in the instant I catch myself and try to shrink away, his arms lock me against him, lift me off the ground and sway me gently from side to side. His head drops forward and he breathes in deeply, as if inhaling me.

“Hey,” he whispers.

“Okay, you guys are nauseatingly adorable,” Kelsey grumbles from behind me, “but next time you could just ask me to move, Sam. Seriously.”

I shake with his laughter as he gently sets me down and loosens his grip enough for me to turn around in his arms to face her.

“Sorry.” I grimace. “Did I hurt you?”

She dusts grass off her yoga bottoms as she stands.

“My ego will have a giant purple bruise. You told me I had you pinned! Now you have to teach me how you did that.” She folds her arms defiantly.

Jack pulls me gently backwards until my back is pressed against his chest.

“That last move is a Carter special,” he rumbles. “Most people don’t get it even after years of hand-to-hand. If it makes you feel better, I wouldn’t have been able to fight my way out if you pinned me like that.”

Akheela steps forward, and I’m not one hundred per cent certain whether it’s just politeness, or whether she’s keen to stop her girlfriend from thinking too carefully about pinning Jack underneath her.

“You must be Jack,” she says, all smile and poise. “I’m Akheela.”

“Good to meetcha, Akheela,” he tucks me against his hip before holding out his hand to shake hers. “I’m glad you guys came through for those self-defence tips.”

Suddenly, he cocks his head, lifts an eyebrow, looks from Kelsey to me with exaggerated concern. “That is what was happening, right? I mean, these women weren’t mugging you?”

I huff a laugh. “Yes, Sir. You arrived just in time to save me.”

Ice washes down my spine. Sir? What have I done? _What have I done?_

Kelsey’s eyes widen. “You guys are military?” She breathes. “That is SO cool.”

My face is an impassive mask of glass. If I move, I’ll shatter. My stupid, _stupid_ mouth.

“Not exactly,” Jack says thoughtfully, twisting me back towards him with a hint of pressure against my hip. His eyes are alight with mischief.

“Ma’am, I know it’s irregular, but with your permission, I’d like to tell them.”

I swallow and frown at the fabricated honorific, something he apparently takes as consent.

He turns back to face the young women.

“Have you heard of the secret service?” He asks earnestly.

Oh, God. Another Luke Skywalker moment is coming.

“Of course,” Kelsey nods. “Are you… oh, but of course, you couldn’t tell us. And… you work together?”

Jack gets that grin that tells me trouble is coming.

“Well, according to our neighbours we both have regular jobs.”

She nods sagely and waits for him to continue, just about vibrating with anticipation.

After drawing out the silence just a fraction longer than strictly necessary, he gives what looks like a little sigh of admission.

“No, she’s more. Uh. Have you heard of the term handler?” Innocence and just a hint of embarrassment mix in his voice. It’s masterful.

Kelsey looks at me with open admiration.

I’m not nearly a good enough actress for this.

I start to grimace, catch myself, contort my mouth into an awkward smile instead.

A thud and a howl of unbridled anguish make the glass patio doors rattle.

Inside, a feline mouth is stretched so wide open with the force of his complaints, that his eyes have disappeared.

I clear my throat, grateful for the distraction, but also suddenly overwhelmed by the humour of the situation.

If Janet could see us now.

“Sir,” I raise my eyebrows meaningfully, “it doesn’t matter how impressive you were on your last mission. If you don’t go say hello to our cat _right now,_ there _will_ be blood.”

—oOo—

Half an hour later, when Akheela’s little Ford reverses out of the driveway, Peg still hasn’t left his arms, and his hand still hasn’t left mine.

“I can’t _believe_ you told them I’m your handler,” I huff as I return Kelsey’s wave.

“I didn’t. I asked her if she had heard of the term.”

The retort is lighthearted, but the sadness haunting his eyes doesn’t lift.

As the door closes behind us, he pulls me against him and I can feel his shoulders releasing.

I’m still barefoot from the training session on the lawn, not having wanted to hurt the girls accidentally. It enhances the difference in our heights and makes me feel inexplicably safe. I snuggle in to his embrace, content to take in the moment, even after Peg squirms out from between us with a little chirp of disgust at being replaced as the object of his dad’s affection.

“I wasn’t expecting you back,” I speak into the t-shirt that smells of him.

“I thought I’d never get out of there,” he answers. His hands draw slow paths up and down my spine. “But I did what you said.”

“What do you mean?”

I want to look at him, but I don’t want to lose the connection between our bodies.

He sighs.

“I reminded them that the pawns they’re moving around on the board have names and families.”

“You kept your people safe.”

Another sigh floods from him.

“I don’t know,” he shakes his head against mine. “I don’t know.”

We can’t talk about it.

But I wish I could take his mind off the decisions he’s just had to be a part of; the invasion or war he’ll carry on his conscience because he agreed to take command of the SGC and was called to a meeting he didn’t want to attend.

I lean back to look at him.

“Well, it’s Saturday night. The least we can do is have a good dinner and share one of those bottles of champagne you keep bringing over. What do you feel like? Pizza? Steak? Chinese?”

I can see his lips moving, fighting with words. Lines of defeat crowd around his eyes.

“Jack? What is it?”

His eyes drop closed. He forms words silently before they come out.

“I. Just. Never want to make another decision in my life.”

His mouth softens, as if the admission was a bad taste he’s purged.

“You decide,” he continues, more quietly. “Whatever you want is good.”

I wish I could erase the lines of care from his face, the tightness from his shoulders. I wish I could carry some of his weight, even if only for one night. Free him of responsibility, leave him free to simply breathe, and rest, and feel pleasure.

A thought — a crazy, thrilling thought — crystallises.

I place two fingers over his lips.

“Whatever I want?” I whisper.

His eyes turn from tired brown to smoky black. I can feel his body’s reaction. It chases sparks of excitement over my skin.

“Whatever you want … Ma’am.”

I move my fingers slowly, tracing the outline of his mouth, my eyes on his.

“Good answer, Agent O’Neill.”

I have to bite my lip to stifle the smile that threatens to surface at how ridiculous that sounds. But he watches me, rapt, sipping in little breaths between lips barely parted under my fingers.

And even if this dissolves into laughter within thirty seconds, I know I want to try.

I reach onto my toes, brush my mouth over his cheek.

“Come,” I whisper before leading him to the bedroom.


	23. True North

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t know that the only thing allowing me to hold my temper through the endless night, the only thread tying me to my seat and to my sanity, was her words. 'You put the safety of the people in your command before anything. Even yourself. The outcome of this meeting will be better because you’re in it.'
> 
> I don’t know if she was right. But I tried to live up to her words when everything in me screamed to tell them all what a disgrace they were and to storm out.
> 
> No. It’s not the lack of sleep.
> 
> It’s the fact that she’s become my True North, when she never asked for that responsibility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For @lu_fle, for giving me courage to continue.
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

The music coming from her stereo cuts straight into my bones tonight.

I don’t tend to play music. I’d never thought of her doing it, either. Yet somehow I’ve always pictured a soundtrack to her smile.

And since we — since _us_. Since I started being able to think of this shining human and me as something as intimate as a two-letter word, she always seems to have music playing in her home.

Usually it’s upbeat. Often, it’s stuff she inherited from her grandma that makes her smile at the memories invokes.

Tonight, it’s more personal. A lilting blues bass and a low-pitched woman’s voice crooning lyrics too poignant for dinner parties. I’ve never heard Carter sing, but this is how I imagine her sounding.

 _I’m so tired, I’m so tired,_ the woman sings, _I wish I was the moon tonight._

Her hand guides me to sit on the edge of her bed and she kneels to unlace my shoes.

I should do more. She deserves better from me than someone who turns up at her house and lets her care for me. But I’m weary to my marrow. All I want is for her presence to erase the last three days.

It’s not even the lack of sleep that got to me. It’s the fucking smugness with which the others threw their people to the fire. They’d call it hardness, I’m sure. Call it strategy. Well, life has made me harder than I ever wanted to be. Hardness doesn’t make you sacrifice a thousand men for the chance to suck up to the guy at the head of the table.

She doesn’t know that the only thing allowing me to hold my temper through the endless night, the only thread tying me to my seat and to my sanity, was her words. _You put the safety of the people in your command before anything. Even yourself. The outcome of this meeting will be better because you’re in it._

I don’t know if she was right. But I tried to live up to her words when everything in me screamed to tell them all what a disgrace they were and to storm out.

No. It’s not the lack of sleep.

It’s the fact that she’s become my True North, when she never asked for that responsibility.

Life has beautiful days. Of course it does.

But after Charlie, I viewed them as a bystander. It was peaceful. Nothing, good or bad, was more than a ripple on my lake.

Until the bloody symbiote led me into Ba’al’s clutches and I found myself unable to die. Because I didn’t want _that_ to be how I left her.

And in that soul-destroying meeting, when I fought my instincts every second, I realised it wasn’t my people I was fighting for. It was her.

I felt no satisfaction when the room swung to support the position I refused to relinquish. All the way on the flight back, I stared out of the window, rolling this one thought over and over in my head. _She’s safe. She’s safe._

Her hands rise up my legs, tug my t-shirt up. Her smile is shy and questioning and I shudder with how much I want to be enough for her. She comes to sit on my knees, supporting her weight on her bare feet on the floor. Even in this, she considers my weakness.

“Do you want me to stop?”

I force the sense of overwhelm behind me, take her face in my hands.

“Never.”

The breath of her soft laugh warms my cheek as I lean in to kiss her.

She smells of grass and tastes of coffee. And the music drifting through the room speaks my mind for me. _I know I’m not well, but I’m alright._

I lift my arms to let her slide the shirt over my head, watch her as she undoes my belt and jeans.

She stops.

Her teeth trap her lower lip, insecurity etching into her skin.

I cast around for something to help her.

“Would you like me to wear the blindfold, Ma’am? I’m sure there are things a handler can’t let her agents see.”

The blindfold that came out of the calendar on day one is lying on her bedside table, neatly placed beside the bath bomb and both notes. It doesn’t take much to lean over and snag it in my fingers.

I close my eyes as she lowers it over my head and the room descends into darkness.

From the lounge, a new song drifts towards us. One I recognise.

_When the night has come, and the moon is dark, and the stars are the only light I see,_

_Well, I won’t be afraid. No I won’t be afraid._

_As long as you stand by me._

Gentle hands guide me to lying , lift my legs and undress me.

I feel the dip of the bed as she straddles me.

The soft fabric of her shirt and yoga pants whisper against my bare skin as she leans over me. My mouth opens in anticipation of her lips, craving them, sighing when I feel them, groaning when they pull away to trail along my chin, down my neck, over my chest.

Her breath is hot on my skin, exquisitely hot, reducing every other part of me to a shiver of longing. When her teeth close over my nipple, my whole body reverberates with the shock.

I offered to wear the blindfold for her. But with my world reduced to velvet night, everything else shrinks until all that remains is her hands, her mouth, her weight.

She moves my hands to the hem of her shirt, helping me slide it over her ribs, along the soft skin on the inside of her arms.

Every part of her I touch is a miracle.

I whimper with loss when she swings away from me. I’m sure she’s not far. I trust her. But I feel exposed, lying prone while I hear her stepping softly on the carpet, hear clothes dropping to the floor, the quiet click of plastic on plastic.

Blindly, I reach for her when her weight returns to the bed. I touch bare skin, the swell of a breast, and groan with wordless want.

She swallows, and again I hear the click of plastic.

“This may be cold,” she murmurs.

The shape of her hand wraps around my shaft. The shape of her hand, but cool as liquid satin, gliding, moving.

“Oh, God, Sam.”

In the darkness she’s created, nothing exists but the way she’s moving around me. I arch off the bed into her, breathless with the building ache.

Her hand slides off my cock, up my stomach, to my chest, to mine where it clings to her hip. With her hands over mine, she guides herself down until the heat of her folds touch me.

Everything is magnified. The catch in her breath, the tension suddenly tightening her fingers on mine, the pulse of her clit against my head, the heat of her core sliding along my length and disappearing.

I want her back. I want her against me. But not like this. Not the way she tensed.

“Sam.” I try to sit up, try to hold her, but one hand on my chest presses me back down.

And then her mouth is around me, drawing my need into her, her tongue gliding along the tingling path she traced with her sex. Her fingers lace through mine, her hands holding mine as her tongue, her lips, dance with the fire that builds and burns and drowns out everything, everything, everything.

Except her.

The North Star.

When my body has collapsed from release, when the sheen of sweat is cooling my skin, when she crawls up my body and pulls off the blindfold, I know she can see the wetness around my eyes. I know she can taste the salt of tears when she kisses it away.

It doesn’t matter.

In a hard world, she is softness.

In a world where she lights the way, I’m willing to live.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I ALWAYS listen to music when I write. And I reference a few songs here that I imagine Sam listening to when she's alone and missing Jack.
> 
> \- 'I wish I was the moon' by Neko Case  
> \- 'Hard of hearing' by Ben Cooper  
> and, of course,  
> \- 'Stand by me'. In my mind, Sam's version of this is by Hey Rosetta!
> 
> If you want to hear these in the flesh, you can find them on the Thousand Days playlist I listen to as I write: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1HjsCWXBSpHoFNKUj9O0R3?si=VlAHWrTeQreXTJS-vM-mcQ


	24. 7 December: Landslide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, mirror in the sky
> 
> What is love?
> 
> Can the child within my heart rise above?
> 
> Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?
> 
> Can I handle the seasons of my life?
> 
> \- Landslide, Fleetwood Mac  
> Written and performed by Stevie Nicks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I prefer writing Jack in A Thousand days. Because I am Sam.
> 
> I dedicate this chapter to every other Sam out there.
> 
> You are precious.  
> Keep believing.  
> xo

*Sam*

Something shifted between us while he was gone.

As I tighten my arms around his chest in the midnight tangle of sheets and pull his back closer to me, as I run my hands over the muscles of his stomach, soft with sleep yet still so strong, I can feel the change.

I felt it the moment he came to my house this afternoon, in the way he lifted me off the ground in front of Kelsey and Akheela to cradle me against him, the way he breathed me in. The way he sagged against me in the hallway when they left and admitted to never wanting to make another decision in his life.

I knew it had nothing to do with dinner.

But I couldn’t name the change until his nightmare woke us ten minutes ago, and he let me lie against his back, against the ugly scars he hides under all those baggy shirts.

He’s letting me protect him.

That’s what’s different. While he was in DC, he let me in.

In the silent house, as the last tension leaves his body and he returns to sleep, a haunting song rises in my memory. One my grandmother tended to play when she thought I was out of earshot, when she didn’t feel the need to be cheerful for me to compensate for my dead mother. Then, she poured a large whisky in the middle of the afternoon and sank into her easy chair and stared up at the sun, and Stevie Nicks’s voice would rise in melancholy around her.

_Oh, mirror in the sky_

_What is love?_

_Can the child within my heart rise above?_

_Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?_

_Can I handle the seasons of my life?_

For years, I skipped this track on the album when it came on, saddened by the image of the day I rushed into the lounge, a gangle of long limbs and teenage energy, and caught her with an empty glass and tears streaming down her face. For once, she didn’t try to jolly it away. She just gave me a smile, so brimming with love and loss that it slammed me to a halt, and her tears continued to flow.

The day I heard dad’s diagnosis in DC, I came home, poured a whisky from the virtually unused bottle in my pantry, and listened to it over and over.

I thought, then, that I understood the meaning.

But tonight, my heart skips ahead to the chorus.

Tonight, I finally understand.

_Well, I've been afraid of changin'_

_'Cause I've built my life around you_

_But time makes you bolder_

_Even children get older_

_And I'm getting older too_

_I took my love, I took it down_

_I climbed a mountain and I turned around_

_And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills_

_'Til the landslide brought me down_

I’ve loved Jack for more years than I ever loved Jonas for.

But Jack’s not the one I built my life around.

I spent my entire adult life avoiding being hurt, because one person hurt me.

And I’ve been so afraid of reliving my memories of Jonas, that I’ve refused to make new memories with the man I want to spend forever with.

All I’ve seen when I’ve looked at myself is a broken person, trapped in a permafrost of pain.

I’ve been terrified of not being good enough for Jack.

But I can’t ever be good enough for him, unless I let go of the thought that I am incapable of becoming more than Jonas made me.

—oOo—

The sun is warm on my cheek, our cat is perched like a pirate’s parrot on my hip — the highest point of my body — and Jack’s arms are around me when I surface from sleep.

As soon as I stir, his lips press into my shoulder.

“Mornin’ darlin’.”

He drags out the Minnesota drawl almost comically. But he’s never called me that before.

_Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?_

I lace my fingers through his over my belly.

“Morning, darling,” I whisper back, even as my heart thunders against the thought of what’s to come.

His chuckle is low and honeyed.

“I like the way that sounds,” he rumbles into the curve of my neck.

And I do, too.

Scared as I am, I’m ready.

I wiggle my hips to dislodge Peg and turn over in his arms.

My fingers find the scars on his back that he allowed me to protect last night. His eyelids drift down, but he doesn’t pull away.

“Make love to me Jack.”

Now he tenses. His eyes flash open.

“We have been,” he murmurs, “since the start.”

But I can see he knows what I’m asking. I don’t even have to speak. I simply hold his gaze.

His eyes bore into mine, the lines of love and care mingling until I have to force my lips together to stop them shaking. But I refuse to look away.

_I took my love, I took it down_

_I climbed a mountain and I turned around_

_And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills_

_'Til the landslide brought me down_

I’ve spent years looking at myself as broken. It’s time for the landslide to bury that version of me and let the ground sprout new seeds.

He’s the one who turns his face away, his mouth drawn tight.

“You’re asking me to hurt you.”

And in the warmth of the morning sun, in the safety of his arms, I realise my landslide has already happened, and the first green shoots are raising their heads.

My lips find his. I soften their hard line with my tongue.

“No, I’m not, Jack,” I speak against his skin. “I’m asking you to help me discover the thousand ways that don’t, so that one day our kids can make gagging noises when we talk about how much fun we had making them. And we can laugh, and tell them to go to their rooms so we can do it again.”


	25. Star map

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I turn her skin into my star map. I thrill at every shiver, every puckering, every rise of gooseflesh. I navigate by her hands on my shoulders, her fingers tangling tighter in my hair, as I search for her islands of sweetness. Her sighs that turn into moans and crest into breathless cries become my treasure chests, and I mark the spots where I find them with an x and promise them that I’ll return, and laugh at the shy giggle that evokes every time.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am blown away, and humbled, by every person who has reached out, with insights and stories and struggles and triumphs, or simply with support.
> 
> And this chapter, I dedicate to the Jacks who hide your pain behind baggy shirts and silence, but who hold us close to your hearts while we heal together.
> 
> And, yes, shoutout to @XWingKC again.  
> You know what that means, unicorns.  
> Enough with the slow, it's time for the burn!
> 
> Stay safe, stay you.  
> The world needs your heart.  
> xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

Her trust is a globe of the most delicate blown glass. Her smile lights it from within. I want to clutch it to my chest in both hands as I tiptoe to the safe under my bed and hide it there, locked away from harm.

But, terrified as I am, I know she deserves to be lifted to the sky and spun in crazy circles, to see the wide horizon and the beauty of every sunset.

And if I’m the one she chose, I’ll step with more care than ever in my life. I’ll learn from every misstep with Sara and Charlie. I’ll carry her to the top of the highest mountain I can find.

So I take her face in my hands and let her eyes light up the dark corners inside me. And I nod.

“But we’ve spoken about this,” I say, as sternly as my shaking emotions can manage. “They get your looks and your brains.”

“And your courage,” she whispers. “And your heart.”

I never want to stop kissing her. But I want to taste every curve and fold of her skin. I want to memorise the tremor of her pulse under my tongue, to tease it into a thundering crescendo and bliss-soaked slowing.

In the lazy morning sun, she lets me discover her as if she’s new again. As if I’ve never held her hand, touched her shoulder, kissed the rise and fall of her beautiful body.

I turn her skin into my star map. I thrill at every shiver, every puckering, every rise of gooseflesh. I navigate by her hands on my shoulders, her fingers tangling tighter in my hair, as I search for her islands of sweetness. Her sighs that turn into moans and crest into breathless cries become my treasure chests, and I mark the spots where I find them with an x and promise them that I’ll return, and laugh at the shy giggle that evokes every time.

Only once, she stops me, as I run my fingers along the soft fold where her body meets her thigh. She presses a plastic tube into my questioning hand.

“Kelsey gave us this,” she says simply.

I recognise the soft click from last night.

“Oh, I remember this.” I can’t hide my body’s reaction to the memory. And the smile that spills across her face becomes yet another treasure chest I have to mark.

“Tell me you’re planning on visiting that spot again, too,” I beg between kisses.

“Oh, you can count on it, Sir.”

Fuck. The things she can make me feel.

Her pulse slows when my fingertips trace around her entrance. I stop, wait for her smile to return, for her tongue to wet her lips, for her nod, before I allow one to slip inside, to run cool slickness into her soft heat. My mouth finds her clit, stroking, kissing, as I enter her with two, then three, riding the rhythm she sets with her hips, following her gasps and sighs of pleasure, the tiny pulses under my tongue, as she lets me open her wider, allows me to twist and deepen inside her.

“Jack.”

Her hand finds mine where it rests on her hip. She holds me with her eyes and doesn’t let go while I rise to my knees to kiss her, her taste dusky on my lips. I sit back against the pillows, guiding her to straddle me.

“Should I get a condom?”

She shakes her head. “I’m still covered.”

She’s so close to where she was last night when she suddenly tightened and slipped away, replacing her core with her mouth. I don’t want that for her today. I need this to be different to anything she’s known.

We’re in textbook position for minimal pain on penetration, that much I know from reading. But textbooks didn’t help her last night.

I cast around for _something_ that will keep the softness in her face.

I reach over to the tube of lube on the bedside table, waggle it in the air.

“Do I get to see what magic you worked on me last night, or would you like me to close my eyes?”

It works. Her embarrassed giggle turns into a helpless, full-bellied laugh that draws out my own. She collapses against my chest, the heat of her core pressed against my length, the sensation causing me to shudder.

Her laughter quietens at my movement. She rocks her hips slowly, gliding over me, coating me with the slickness I applied to her, drawing new shudders with every slow pass.

I can’t move, or I’ll lose control.

Her eyes rise to mine, pupils dark and wide. Her lips are parted.

And the relief that floods me almost makes me lose it. Her eyes are dark with arousal, not with pain.

My mouth opens in wordless want as she watches me. My fists ball into the sheets, clutching for control as she moves further, harder, faster, rising until her opening crests over my head and I can’t contain the sound that tears through me.

She takes my shaft in her hand, steadying me under her. She slides herself along the tip of my cock again and again, until the waves of pleasure become to painful to contain.

“SAM,” I gasp.

She takes my tip inside her, and the touch of her heat surrounding me is too much. Release thunders though me, obliterating everything, spilling into her, out of her, over her fist still holding my base.

I’m shaking. My hands are carving valleys into the soft skin of her hips. Her free hand is braced on my chest.

“Fuck. I’m sorry,” I release a shuddering sigh.

She shakes her head, wonder shining from her eyes, her smile.

“That felt good,” she whispers. “You. You were inside me, and it felt good.”

She sounds as if I just blew up a sun.

God, if only she could understand how incredible she is.

“And for my next trick, I’ll try lasting more than a second,” I grumble instead, unsure how to tell her one tenth of what I feel.

She releases me, crawls into the cocoon of my arms. Her head comes to rest on my shoulder.

“I love you, Jack O’Neill.”

I close my eyes, breathe her in, trap this moment in another shining globe of glass.

My cheek drops onto the warm silk of her hair.

“I love you, too,” I whisper.


	26. Beer girl, champagne woman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Peg’s eating your bacon!” I protest.
> 
> “Let him.” Jack’s eyes on mine are unwavering.
> 
> I wish he would play the fool, would let my admission go, would leave me to my demons.
> 
> Instead, his love sinks into my flesh until I can’t hold back tears of broken-open rawness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For everyone who reached out.
> 
> Your care helps me to find champagne smiles on dark days.
> 
> Thank you  
> xo

*Sam*

The morning floats by in a dream-like haze. It was awkward. I know. I waited too long, held back by my fear until I messed it up for him. It could have been perfect, but I was frightened. I know. I know. But every time I start to spiral into what I should have done differently, how I should have been better, his hand finds mine, or he distracts me with a goofy joke.

It’s as if he can read my mind.

We make bacon and eggs and pile it in fluffy mounds on top of toast, eating with one hand while our fingers intertwine on the countertop between us. Peg, safely out of range of my arm because he knows I would plop him on the floor, sits on the counter and tries to steal Jack’s bacon.

Absently, I wonder if this is what a honeymoon feels like.

I've never had a morning after like this one.

First times haven’t exactly left a great taste in my mouth.

“Say, how about we decorate the tree today?”

He does it again, pulling me out of myself as I begin to drown in my doubt. For a moment, I catch a look of care in his eyes before he snaps his grin back into place.

“I’m sorry.”

It slips out before I can stop myself.

His smile fades.

“It's okay if you have work to do," he says quietly.

I shake my head.

“No. No, I’m…” I pull my fingers out of his, curl them convulsively round the edge of my plate.

“I’m sorry it can’t just be spontaneous and easy and sexy with me,” I blurt my pain.

His chair scrapes across the floor as he pushes up to standing. He takes the hand on my plate and pulls me along until I’m standing pressed against him, our bare toes touching on the floor. His right arm circles my hips, the left hand cups my chin and lifts my face to meet his eyes, deep and loving.

“I won’t let you diminish this,” he says.

He holds my gaze, even when my chin betrays me and wobbles, when I try to twist away.

A delicate clink of cutlery and an open-mouthed purring chew announces that our cat burglar has succeeded in his bacon mission.

I pounce on the opportunity.

“Peg’s eating your bacon!” I protest.

“Let him.” Jack’s eyes on mine are unwavering.

I wish he would play the fool, would let my admission go, would leave me to my demons.

Instead, his love sinks into my flesh until I can’t hold back tears of broken-open rawness.

His arm folds around my shoulders, nestling me against his chest. His hand cradles my head.

“I won’t let you diminish this,” he says again.

He holds me until I sniff and pull away with puffy eyes.

Pegasus is lying down between our plates, now both devoid of bacon. The little ginger gourmet has avoided the eggs and toast, of course. His front paws are neatly tucked under him and I have never seen a smugger grin than the one on his feline face.

“You are going to be _so_ sick, Pegasus,” I sigh, too overwhelmed with emotion to even pretend anger.

“Yeah, but it was worth it, Mom,” Jack chuckles in my ear. “C’mon. Let’s clear the dishes before he eats them, too. There’s a burger joint near the Christmas store.”

We pick an array of dark blue baubles, strings of warm white lights and gold tinsel thread. Well, I say we do, but really, I’m trailing behind him through the store, my mouth hanging open at both the variety of decorations and the evident pleasure with which he leans into the process.

Nobody would believe that he’s spent nearly a decade without a Christmas tree in his own home. My heart pinches at someone with so much joy to give who carries so much sadness.

Our trolley is already overflowing when he swings down a new aisle and overarm pitches a long string of bright blue tinsel into the trolley.

“One more stop,” he grins. “I have an idea for the top of the tree.”

In a less gaudy corner, he halts in front of an array of empty glass baubles and picks three clear globes of different sizes with removable tops, designed to be filled by hand. Next he steers us to the displays of miniature lights and picks three delicate strands of gold wire with pinpricks of light set along their lengths. When he veers away from the tills yet again, I have to laugh.

“ _One_ more stop?” I tease.

“Hey! I thought women were supposed to like shopping!”

“I’m not really your average woman, Sir,” I can’t help but smile.

His fingers brush mine for the briefest second.

“You sure aren’t,” he murmurs in a tone that turns my knees to jelly and my belly to liquid honey.

When we’re on the final approach to the tills, the pet aisle catches my eye.

“Hang on, they have stuff for pets?” I stop dead in my tracks. “We have to get Peg something for his first Christmas with us!”

“Not your average woman, huh?” He chuckles as he pauses to let me catch up with him, so he can lean a shoulder against me and shoot me a wink.

I want to twine my fingers through his and squeeze them with all the love rushing through me. I wish I didn’t have to hide this from the world.

A certainty spreads, warm and solid as a sun-warmed tree, through me.

I don’t need more time.

I don’t want to wait another day to spend my life with him.

All I need is to somehow know that this morning wasn’t a false start. I can’t ask him to be with me if I can’t even do the most basic thing required of a woman.

Bitter apples of determination droop and ripen on the branches of my tree.

“Okay, he needs this.”

Jack’s voice pulls me back to the busy store. He’s holding a short, candy cane striped stick from which a puffy fabric sprig of catnip-stuffed mistletoe dangles on an elasticised string.

A vine of sweetness rises from the soil and wraps itself around the branches, dripping joy.

I allow the dimpled grin to spread across my face before I answer.

“What, you don’t think he can get a kiss on the strength of his own devastating good looks and sparkling wit?”

“Smartass,” he grumbles as he chucks the toy into our trolley.

A cat igloo in the shape of a giant present, in emerald green and red that will bring out the gold of Peg’s eyes, follows, as well as a pack of treats shaped like turkey drumsticks and a bag of catnip-stuffed mice dressed in tiny Santa and elf outfits that crinkle when you touch them — the latter meant to wait for him under the tree until Christmas morning, though I somehow don’t imagine his dad having the restraint for that.

“What?” He asks innocently when we finally head to the checkout queue.

“The mice are for under the tree, right?”

“That’s what we decided.” Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

“Until Christmas Day?”

“Carter!” He gives an exasperated shrug. “You act like I have no self-control! Ooh, sparklers! We need those for his Christmas dinner!”

He’s playing along. I know it. Yet somehow that makes it even harder to resist. I’m still giggling by the time we get to the checkout.

“Should we stop by your house to pick up Charlie’s stars?”

The question slips out so easily as I ease my car out of the parking bay. I almost miss the tug of sadness in his mouth.

I cut the engine, the shuddering silence an echo of my heart. He’s so bound to my world that I forget he had a whole life, filled with love and joy and heartbreak, before we met.

I have no right to push my way into his past.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

He cuts me off with a shake of his head.

I suck in a breath. How do I tell him that I don’t expect our future to come at the expense of his past? I open my mouth, but cannot find the words.

“I haven’t had a chance to finish them.”

His smile looks like remorse, tinted with regret. His hand curls into a loose fist on his knee.

I ache to reach for him. But I’m not sure whether I’ll be crossing a line if I do.

The silence thickens between us, cold and and heavy as the sky before snow.

He swallows without looking up from his lap.

“Charlie would like your tree.” His voice is thick.

My fingers find his.

“Well then,” I speak past the lump in my throat, “how about I make us some lunch while you finish his stars, and tonight we hang them on our tree?”

While I build sandwiches in his kitchen, accompanied by the sound of sawing that filters in through the open garage door, I let my mind off its leash to sniff aroundthe edges of what I see. To imagine coming home to this house and calling it ours. To dream of dropping my keys on his hall table and shouting: “darling, I’m home.”

I cut the sandwich in half across the middle the way I do at home, not diagonally like in restaurants, and carry the plate and a beer to the garage, thrilling at the smile that crinkles hiseyes when he looks up at me.

Sawdust leaves a bronze trail across his forehead.

“You not eatin’?” He frowns.

“Mine’s still in the kitchen.”

“Well, go fetch it, then! Unless ya can’t stand to be around all the boy stuff in the garage.”

His eyes sparkle over his grin, and he’s more than ready to duck to avoid the bottle cap I throw at him.

So we eat our sandwiches together, me perching on the uncluttered edge of his workbench, him leaning back against it, his hip skimming my knee, his left hand caressing my thigh every time he reaches for the beer he’s set down between my legs.

After I’ve cleared the plates, I return, drawn by the gravity of his smile. We work together with no more than the occasional comment, him cutting and sanding twenty four perfect stars, me threading fishing twine through the tiny holehe’s made at the tip of each one.

Outside, the wind picks up. It’s unlikely to snow, but the weather is finally turning to the bitter Winter we’ve expected.

“Do you use your fireplace?” He asks as he hands me the last star to thread.

“Sure,” I frown.

“Good. I’ll chuck some extra wood in your car. I’m thinking champagne and a big ol’ rug in front of the fire and the tree tonight. And not much else.” His grin turns wicked.

I abandon my star to swipe at the sawdust on his forehead.

“Jack O’Neill,” I tease. “Where is this fascination with champagne from? I thought you liked beer!”

“I do,” he shrugs. “But I’m not tryin’ to impress myself.”

He watches me, his smile stretching wider as his words sink in.

I prop one hand on my hip. “Oh, come on. I’m a beer girl!”

His thumb traces the line of my cheek. His eyes bore into mine.

“No, you’re not.”

His lips taste of wood and leather. His arms, muscles hard from controlling the saw, pull me against him. I melt into his kiss, and into the certainty that tonight, tonight, if I can let him love me, I can tell him how I feel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for my absence, unicorns.
> 
> This life is hitting us all with knobbly clubs at the moment, I think.  
> In my day job, I'm a vet in industry, and I've had to spend every spare moment this week trying to explain to people that they should not use horse dewormer or cattle tick killer to ward off Covid-19.  
> If I want to look on the bright side, I could focus on the fact that I'll be published in the South African national press tomorrow.  
> But the truth is, a year after the start of this disease, and with friends across the world still dying, and people still refusing to wear masks and stay safe but rather protesting in the streets and clinging onto every new rumour of protection; it sucked me dry.
> 
> But there were moments of light this week.  
> Like Amanda Gorman's breathtaking poem at the Biden / Harris inauguration.  
> Like the messages from you, here on AO3 or on social media, reaching out to hear if I was okay.
> 
> My body was fine, but my heart was not. And your kindness brought me back from darkness.
> 
> Updates will be slower in the coming days.  
> We're still fighting the battle to keep animal drugs out of human bodies, not because people want to deprive animals of the dewormers they need, but because they are frightened for them selves and clinging to false hope.  
> I'm going to need to keep using my words to help them in the coming days.
> 
> But I wanted to share a part of Sam and Jack's perfect day with you as thanks for what you've done.  
> You were my Jack this week.  
> You have no idea how much that means.


	27. Music for Sam to dance to

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorrow or joy
> 
> Which do you like?
> 
> If that's the choice
> 
> Then why can't you decide?
> 
> Do you wanna go back?
> 
> Well you know you can't
> 
> It's like a chain-link fence pressing into your back
> 
> But I got you now
> 
> I don't care about what you were before I came
> 
> Just come out with me tonight
> 
> I wanna dance with you
> 
> That's what I wanna do
> 
> I wanna dance with you
> 
> I wanna see your body move
> 
> I wanna dance with you
> 
> That's all I wanna do
> 
> I wanna dance with you
> 
> \- ‘Dance’, Tim Baker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unicorns, she's still alive!  
> Thank you for waiting on this.  
> And thank you @XWingKC, for making it worth waiting for...

*Sam*

I don’t feel like myself today. I feel as if I’m watching a film of my life, with a beautiful, desirable, graceful actress playing my part.

I look on at the perfection of it all, of Peg unable to decide whether he prefers staring at the crackling fire, or snuggling in his new red and green igloo in front of it, or chasing the strands of tinsel that drift down from the branches of the tree. The perfection of our baubles and our fairy lights filling the room with strings of reflected gold and blue. The softness with which he hangs each of Charlie’s stars on the edge of a branch with a light or two just behind them to glow through their centres.

We’ve opened the joked-about champagne, and are stripped to t-shirts and jeans, bare foot, warmed by movement and fire.

I’ve connected the iPod Cassie gave me for my birthday last year to the sound system and let it scroll randomly through the songs she loaded on it for me. She called it: “Music for Sam to dance to”. And some of the songs I’ve heard, I’ve loved. But I’ve never really listened much, always opting for safer, older songs inherited from my grandmother.

If I’m honest, I’ve been a little nervous of a teenager’s interpretation of what her spinster aunt would dance to.

One of her bouncier songs draws to a close, and in the silence that follows, I pick up my glass and step into the centre of the room to take in the magic from a distance.

Jack follows, tipping his glass against mine before wrapping his free arm around my waist and tucking his hand into my butt pocket.

I lean my head on his shoulder. The tree flickers a lazy greeting.

Slow, almost sad piano chords drift from the speakers, joined after a few seconds by a velvet voice.

This isn’t at all what I expected Cass to pick for me. But the eerie feeling of watching the movie of my life returns with the singer's words.

He is singing the soundtrack to my life.

 _Sorrow or joy? Which do you like?_ The voice questions.

_If that’s the choice, then why can’t you decide?_

I take it all in again. A tree, filled with light, and hope, and memories. A warming fire. A purring cat. And the man I love more than life breathing slowly next to me, his fingers warm on my butt.

 _I wanna dance with you,_ the chorus starts, pensive and dreamy as the verse.

_I wanna see your body move._

_I wanna dance with you,_

_That’s all I wanna do._

I turn to him, anchor my thudding heart in the angle of his jaw under my fingertips, the soft sharpness of his stubble.

“Jack, are you up for trying this morning again?”

He opens his mouth, but suddenly I don’t want to hear his reassurances. I don’t want anything to stop this dance.

I slide my fingers over his lips.

“I know you’re going to say you don’t need it.” I sigh. “And I love you for it. But _I_ need this.”

That’s all my courage can bear.

He nods, pressing his lips to my fingertips in a lingering kiss. His hand rises from my jeans pocket, sliding over my back, raising goosebumps on my neck.

“But first, I think it’s time we opened another door on your calendar.”

He sets our glasses down by the fire and pulls me with him to the bedroom.

“Today’s?” I look at the rows of unopened doors, still not used to the idea of all these gifts.

“Hmm, nope. Friday’s. I have plans for Friday’s.”

On Friday, on the phone from Washington, he’d told me that day’s gift was meant for two to share. I wonder idly if he set up all the weekend gifts to require togetherness. So far, the weekday gifts have been equally easy to use alone. How did I find such thoughtful man? How does he even exist?

“Well?” He prods me forward.

“Oh, right,” I laugh.

I lift the perfectly working miniature latch on the door marked 5. A little black and purple bottle peeks out at me.

“Intimate massage oil, with erotic musk and sensual rose,” I read. “Does that mean—“ I blink from the bottle in my palm to the smaller bottle of lube with similar lettering on my night stand.

“Means I get to see ya naked, Carter,” he growls from behind me, the sound husky.

His arms wrap around me and gather me against him. He nips the sensitive skin behind my left ear. His hips roll into my back, gentle, yet firm. And the way he presses into me, I don’t need words to know he’s telling me he heard me. He’s ready to try this morning again. My eyes close, I let my head fall to the side, opening my neck to his kiss. To his love.

“C’mon.” He reaches round me to gather up the soft blanket at the foot of my bed.

“Fire,” he answers the question in my eyes, already halfway to the door.

With nervous excitement gnawing at my belly, I follow, almost bashing into him when he stops again at the linen cupboard in the hall to pull out my softest towel.

I no longer want to feel as if I’m watching someone beautiful playing my role, I think as I help him lay the blanket and towel on the floor, as he slips my shirt over my head and helps me out of my underwear.

I want this to be all me.

His smile is as slow and soft as the fairy lights on the tree and the flickering of the fire. The sensation he chases over my skin fizzing like the bubbles in my glass of champagne.

Tomorrow the world will be real again. I’ll be clumsy and awkward, and I’ll mess things up a thousand times.

But in this perfect moment, I am the person I see reflected in his eyes.

Tonight I’m a dancer, caught in a snowglobe that smells of musk and rose.

I stretch out on the towel, cushioned by the blanket, and close my eyes. His hands start on my shoulders, thumbs circling the ever-present knots, drawing sighs and whimpers from deep in my throat. He responds with gentle laughter or lips pressed to the tight places.

I drift further from reality.

His hands slide down my arms, teasing out tension I never thought I had, then glide back up and down along my spine.

As my breathing slows, his touch deepens, teasing, pushing, dragging tight bands of muscle despite the oil that smoothes the surface of my skin.

For a moment, I lose the touch of his body. I hear the click of his knee as he stands, the hushed thud of clothes dropping to the floor. When he kneels back down, his skin presses against mine.

I twist on my elbow.

The sight of his body steals my words for a breath.

“You okay?” He asks, a frown clouding his eyes.

The heat from the fire, the glow from the champagne, drive blood to my cheeks. I don’t care.

I lick my lips, taking in his toned chest, the sparse line of hair trailing from his belly to the denser curls between his thighs, dark against the soft skin of his erection.

His arousal chases fire through me. I want him to press against me, to move inside me, to obliterate the space between our souls.

I want him.

And I want him to know it.

Slowly, deliberately, I raise my eyes from his cock, over his body, to his lips.

“You’re fucking good looking, General O’Neill.”

His eyes widen in surprise, before his face twists away, flushing.

“Well, I’m glad _somebody_ noticed,” he mock-grumbles.

But his smile holds the delight and discomfort of a teenager.

“Now, lay your ass back down, Colonel. I’m not nearly through with you.”

I stop him with my hand on his wrist.

“Is this okay for your knee?”

His face softens, his fingers coming to rest over mine.

“It’s fine. But if I pretend it isn’t, will you make it up to me later?”

Laughter shakes me.

“Ya, sure, youbetcha, Sir.”

“Excellent,” he drawls as I lie back down.

Something shifts in the mood, in his movements, after that. His hands, oil-slick, musk-scented, still find the tight places in my butt, my thighs, my calves. But every movement glides back to the apex of my legs, whispering between folds that crave his every touch, until I arch and gasp with need.

“Jack, please.” I can’t contain the plea as his fingertips once again graze my entrance. “Please, I want you.”

I feel him leaning forward, feel his lips pressing into my shoulder. His left hand finds mine, fingers twining, squeezing reassurance, as I feel his finger entering me, circling, reaching, making me gasp and sigh. The drumbeat of dread starts in my chest, but even that is muted tonight, threaded through with a triple rhythm strumming in my blood.

_I want this. I want this._

A twist of his fingertip deep inside me releases a shudder, a tightness easing.

_I want this. I want this._

“Yes,” I move my hips up to meet his hand, “please.”

A second finger, then a third, find my slick heat, draw desire against my trembling muscles, make me buck and rise until I tumble headlong into pulsing release.

The crackle of logs on the fire tugs at my thoughts. Two weeks ago, I didn’t know that I could trust anyone enough to coax this bliss from me.

Oh, I trusted.

I trusted him with my life.

Him, and Teal’c, and Daniel. And my father.

With my life, but not with my heart.

Not with my surrender.

Not with the naked completeness of me.

Yet now, I don’t only trust him with this. I trust himwith every shameful secret.

Funny, how secrets are more precious somehow than life.

His body is heavy on my back, his left hand in mine, his right hand teasing ripples of bliss out of my very core, his legs wrapped in mine. I want to hold on to this moment, but more than that, I want him to know me.

Bracing against his weight, I roll over.

He rises to his knees and I guide him back to lean against the side of my armchair.

The bottle of massage oil is fire warmed when I lift it. His lips are parted, his eyes watching me with every inch of the trust I feel in him.

I click the top open, and the scent of rose and musk rises to meet me. I gather a shallow pool in my palm, form a fist to spread it over my fingertips, and rise to my knees between his thighs as I wrap my hand around the length of his shaft, chasing the falling droplets with fingertips, cupping the tender skin around his testicles.

His throat works around his groan.

“Christ, Sam. If you keep doing that, I’m not going to last.”

I still, and smile. I don’t deserve his understanding.

I tilt forward, until my lips graze his neck and my core brushes against his cock.

“Tomorrow, then,” I whisper. “Because tonight I want you inside me.”

His hands steady my hips. His eyes bolster my courage as I guide him inside me.

The band of tension that I dread raises its head, ugly and sharp, but Jack holds me in his gaze, his hands on my hips solid as the ground under my knees.

With his eyes on mine, he moves gently back and forward in the space below the pain, his heat rising and falling inside me in shallow waves, filling me, opening me, drawing out the softness around my fear, deeper and deeper until I pulse into silence, feeling him inside me as if floating, knowing him around me as if breathing.

Without pain.

So deep inside me. Without pain.

Until it clamps down again.

I growl with fear and fury as a new spasm rips through me.

But he doesn’t waver. He holds me steady while my breathing deepens, while my heart slows, until it fades.

When my hips sink onto his, his hands loosen, his arms wrap around my back. He pulls me against him.

A circle of love surrounds me.

“I’ve got you,” he breathes against my hair. “I’ve got you.”

And when I look up, what I see reflected in the flickering firelight is the person who knows my darkness and loves me anyway.

“You’ve got me.”

My fingertips trace the edges of his lips, memorise the line of his stubble-pierced jaw, as I rock against him, slowly at first, but then faster, harder, as his closeness drives fire into my bones and pain stays cowering in the shadows. His hands rise, his sighs echo my own, his breath tightens, his eyes drift shut, his deep cries follow mine. He pulses deep inside me as pleasure rips through me with her honey-tipped claws.

I’m floating on the moment.

I’m suspended in our love.

“Are you okay?” He asks for what must be the seventh time today.

And for the first time, my answer has changed.

Because I’m not okay. I will never be okay again.

“I’m better than okay,” I whisper.

I’m still shaking, still high on feeling him inside me. But I have never been more sure.

“I don’t need more time, Jack. I don’t need the last 980 days. I’m yours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, *she admits guiltily to a group of people who share her passion for fixing sadness in fictional lives with more fiction* , I did a thing in this chapter that I feel I need to own up to.
> 
> Tim Baker's song, 'Dance', was only released in 2019. 
> 
> And even though this is thousands of words of make-believe, I've never broken the timeline by making them listen to a song that didn't exist yet.
> 
> Yes, folks, I'm *that* kind of nerd.
> 
> But it's been a bit of a week. And this song was just something Sam and I both needed in our day.  
> I hope you don't mind.  
> xo


	28. Already, and Always

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Jack.” She lets out a breath. “Even if it’s as a friend, I want you to stay and have dinner. Okay?”
> 
> I want to shout how wrong she is. But she may not want to be more than friends. Oh, I don’t doubt her love. But you can love someone and still not want to be with them, if what they need is not something you want to give.
> 
> I’m backed against a wall now.
> 
> With a bitter twist in my gut at the irony of the words I’ve chosen to tell her, I take her hand and lead her to the bedroom. I unlatch yesterday’s door and pull out the soft black velvet rope I hid in there for her to find.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was supposed to spend today doing something else.
> 
> But you know Jack. He would NOT let this rest until I told you his story.
> 
> I hope you enjoy Jack's twist, and that you like the glimpse into the rest of the story that he insisted I give you before we all dive back into the week.
> 
> Because he thinks it's worth waiting for. And ... you know ... Jack knows things.
> 
> xo

*Jack*

I love the minutes before the alarm goes.

No matter what this day holds, if it starts with this, with her sleeping in my arms or me curled into hers, I know I’ll want to live it.

I love how completely she allows herself to relax with me now, in deep sleep, but also as she wakes. It wasn’t like that to start with. Then, she’d tense, or crumple, and I wouldn’t know if that was memory or regret, disgust or fear.

Her alarm sounds, and she stirs. Stretches against me, languid as a cat. Her hands find my fingers and hers lace into them, pulling my arms further around her, like a blanket.

I nuzzle my face into her neck, where her smell is so pure.

“Mornin’, Darlin’,” I whisper, relishing the tingle the words send through my skin, the goosebumps it raises on hers, thrilling with the anticipation of hearing her say the same thing back to me.

The way she did yesterday. The way she did yesterday. Before what she told me. Before she told me she had made her choice.

She shifts in my arms, unlacing our fingers, twisting around to face me.

Her hand rises to my jaw. Her eyes are blue and clear. They hold me in their thrall, piercing through me. As if she’s searching me for doubt.

I don’t know how to answer her more completely than by looking back.

Whatever it is she wants to find, let her see it.

Her smile creeps over me as softly as the dawn.

Her kiss is slow and deep, an echo of the way she moved on me in the firelight.

By the time she pulls away, I’m shaking with the power of her touch.

But when she slips away to go start the coffee, I see it. The dark bloom of bruises on her hips where my hands gripped her through her pain.

I don’t know why, but when the creamy, unblemished skin of her back disappears under my t-shirt, it feels like goodbye.

With a heart of stone, I shower, dress, make the bed. Give her space. I give her space because I want to run to her, to drown in the reassurance of her love.

But I bruised her.

Toasted bagels and cream cheese and coffee with cream wait for me in the kitchen, along with her smile.

She walks into my arms.

“Morning, Darling.”

The words I waited for, wash over me.

“I’m so sorry about the bruises, Sam.”

There’s no other way to come out with it.

Her lips taste of coffee, of softness I don’t deserve. I’m frozen under her kiss, guilty, confused. She cups my jaw, her eyes once again piercing me, stealing my breath.

“I’m not,” she says quietly. “You have no idea what you gave me last night, Jack. I…” her smile flashes brighter before she turns away. “I also keep forgetting to feed you. C’mon. Eat something before the cat helps himself again.”

We eat standing up, her body tucked against me. She talks about the remaining friendly worlds to visit to update their gate codes, about an idea she had for looping naquidah reactors back on each other to form a perpetual power loop for ships that aren’t in use to reduce harmful energy surges on startup.

I sink back into the perfection of the moment, allow myself for a moment to forget the way she twisted away, the bruises, the truth she searched for in my eyes.

“Sorry, I must be boring you,” she breaks into my thoughts.

Chatting. She’s _chatting._ I never want her to stop.

“What do you have planned today? Oh, sorry that’s silly of me, you probably can’t tell me about anything except the commissary potatoes.”

I shake my head around a last mouthful of cheesy bagel.

“I guess I’ll start looking at transfer options?”

I didn’t mean to phrase it as a question, but it’s a big fucking deal. The biggest deal in my life, in her career.

She sets her bagel down, turns to me.

“No, Jack.”

The floor drops away from under my feet.

Breakfast turns to dust in my mouth.

“No? I thought…”

Her smile is the only thing tethering me to the edge of the gaping hole that’s opened beneath me.

Again, her eyes look into me.

“I made my decision. And nothing will change how I feel. You. You’ve given me.” Her mouth searches for words, even as her eyes hold me back from the precipice. “You’ve let me know that I’m capable of loving you. But that was my choice. You still need to make yours. Jack — I’m never going to be the woman you can push up against the wall and take in a moment of passion. Or have quick, sleepy, sexy morning sex with.”

I close my eyes. That’s what made her pull away from me this morning, what made her slide out from under the covers and leave.

“Sam, I—“

Her fingers cover my mouth, silencing me.

“No. You can’t answer that right now.” She smiles again, a smile of peace and knowing that gives me a glimpse into her future. Wise, old eyes in a time-worn, love-crinkled face. The wise eyes speak on, feeding their peace to me word by word.

“I know you love me. I will always, always know that. Whatever you choose.”

And the words I need to say are right there, they want to pour out in a jumble of confession.

But she needs me to wait, before she can believe me. And I’ll wait if she needs that.

I loosen my clenched fingers from the edge of the hole I’m dangling above, use them to push a stray strand of hair out of her face.

“Tonight, then?” I ask. “Can I answer you tonight?”

A frown draws her eyes into doubt.

I draw a breath for courage.

“I don’t need to tell you that I’ve chosen, Sam. I need to tell you why.”

—oOo—

The words swirl inside me in a mad pattern of love and lust and terror and excitement all day. When I pour the third ice-cold cup of coffee down the drain with a sigh, Walter looks up from his console and asks worriedly if he should call Doctor Jamieson.

God forbid.

I brief what needs briefing, sign what needs to be signed — thankfully nothing new on the intergalactic front since the meeting in DC — and wander to Teal’c’s office in the late afternoon.

“Hey, T. You up for some sparring? It’s about time I learnt that move you always pull to floor me.”

Within an hour, sweat is pouring off me, my shirt has been ripped in two places and my arm is red in the spot that takes the opponent’s weight in this particular manoeuvre. My knee is screaming for mercy and normally I would call it quits, but today I need the pounding to calm my nerves. After the third time I hit the deck, the words stopped spinning and thudded into place. Now all I need is the courage to say them.

A hesitant tap at the door draws our attention as Teal’c helps me up yet again.

Sam has already changed into civvies.

“Um, hey, Teal’c, Sir. I, I just wanted to let you know that I’m heading home.”

She bounces twice on her heels.

“Okay, uh. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As she walks away, Teal’c takes a step back and nods towards the door.

I look back at him, chewing at an explanation.

“Would you like to accompany her, General O’Neill?”

It’s the first sign of acknowledgement of _us_ since we left the cabin.

His quiet acceptance is almost my undoing.

Tonight _cannot_ go wrong. I can not lose her now.

“No, it’s fine, T. Let’s go again.”

He frowns.

“Is everything okay, O’Neill?”

The question’s so out of character for him, that I have to smile. In medieval times, there was one day per year when jesters became kings and kings servants. I’m about to do the same with Sam. And T already has.

I cock my head at him. “Is that you in there, Daniel?”

The big man simply lifts an eyebrow in response.

“I’m fine, T. She’s fine. We’re fine.” _I really hope that’s still the case an hour from now._ “C’mon. One more time. I’ve almost got it.”

And as we take our places, I focus twice as hard on my body to stop wondering whether it’s the move or the words I almost have.

—oOo—

Frying onions and garlic greet me with their friendly chatter and their warming smell the moment I push open her front door. Music and flickering lights beckon from the lounge and a streak of ginger and white impales itself in the leg of my jeans.

Grateful for something to hold on to, I drop my keys on her hall table and toe off my shoes, before padding to the kitchen with a furiously purring Peg in my arms.

She’s even more beautiful than she was this morning.

She’s changed into a soft grey knit dress that hugs her from slender hips down to mid-thigh, but opens to a wide, folded neck that drapes loosely over her shoulders.

Small drops of crystal sparkle below her ear lobes.

She smiles without speaking, her blue eyes wide and wise.

“Wow,” I breathe.

Her smile widens, and she drops the wooden spoon in the skillet to come towards me.

“Hey Peg, could I steal your dad for a kiss?”

She deposits him on the counter, and then she’s in my arms, and I almost want to say nothing, nothing at all, if it means more moments like this.

But gambling is what I do. I can’t stand still. And I can’t avoid this. Not with her lips on mine and her scent wrapped around me and her tongue sliding against my teeth and my body thrumming, straining, beating, to be closer to her. Not with what she thinks my body wants from her.

I steady myself against her arms.

“Smells good,” I say. “Can I help ya finish it in a little while?”

She nods, the peace back in her face.

“Of course.” She pulls away, busies herself at the stove.

For a breath, her shoulders tighten the way they do when she hears bad news. When she turns back to me, her face is smooth again, but sadness lingers in the lines around her mouth.

“Jack.” She lets out a breath. “Even if it’s as a friend, I want you to stay and have dinner. Okay?”

I want to shout how wrong she is. But she may not want to be more than friends. Oh, I don’t doubt her love. But you can love someone and still not want to be with them, if what they need is not something you want to give.

I’m backed against a wall now.

With a bitter twist in my gut at the irony of the words I’ve chosen to tell her, I take her hand and lead her to the bedroom. I unlatch yesterday’s door on the calendar and pull out the soft black velvet rope I hid in there for her to find.

My fingers glide nervously over its surface.

She watches me, unmoving, until I drop it to my side and pull her against me.

I can say this. I think. But I can’t bear to watch her reaction.

Her arms reach around me, comforting me without knowing why.

And I’ve nothing left to do but start.

“When I went to buy the things for this calendar, when I met Kelsey,” I start.

She nods. Waits.

“She mentioned that your dyspareunia may have started, or worsened, because of trauma. Um. So she made me promise her that until we got to know each other, that I would always let you lead. Just in case.”

Her hands on my back tighten fractionally.

“The thing is, Sam…”

I try again.

“This morning, you, you said I would never be able to push you up against a wall and.” I swallow around the violence the image evokes. “And take you. But I’ve never wanted that. I do that to people I hate, Sam. For a living.” _Or out of blind rage, like when I did it to your fiancé._

“I would never want to do that to you. But I didn’t know before I met you, before I let you, that…”

My hand tightens around the rope in my hands.

“Sam, the night you blindfolded me. I’ve never felt. So. Safe.”

_Shit. I’ve rehearsed this. Why can’t I just say it?_

“I’ve never wanted to control you. But the thought of _you_ pushing _me_ up against a wall and doing what you want… It drives me wild. I want you to lead. Always. More than lead. If…” _If you don’t call me a freak and tell me to get out of your sight right now._

Three slow breaths pass.

Then, her lips move against my neck.

“I beat myself up for weeks about whether I should have left SG-3 to guard the gate on my first command. Still do, some days. You make those calls, day in and day out, for every team on the base. For us. For me.”

She pulls back to look at me. Her eyes glisten. Her hand finds mine where it clenches around the rope.

“I don’t know where you find the strength.”

Her fingers slide over mine, between them, loosening their death grip.

Her lips slide along my jaw to my ear.

She leans in closer, her body pressed against mine through the soft grey wool.

“Take your clothes off, Jack,” she whispers.

Her teeth close over my ear lobe, drawing a gasp.

“Now.”

She watches me undress, her eyes chasing mad thoughts, reckless desire, wild need through my veins.

Her fingers outline the red swells on my arms and chest that will darken into bruises by morning. Bruises to match the ones I unwittingly gave her.

I grimace and look away.

Soft lips press into the darkest mark, trail along the bruise to the swell of my pec, tender with impact and exercise. She sucks my nipple between her teeth, teasing its tip with her tongue, and my whole body bucks into her.

Fuck. I thought I remembered bliss from the first time. But she’s still fully dressed, she’s barely touched me, and I can hardly stand for shaking.

She glances up at me, her tongue still stroking, a smoky smile tucking dimples into her cheeks.

“Lie down for me, darling.”

Every word drives me deeper into her thrall.

She straddles me and lifts my arms, looping the rope around my wrists and through the wrought iron of the headboard. We both know I can twist free with a single move, but the thought of what she’s doing makes me ache with need for her to touch me, to hold me, to use me.

Her fingers drag down my torso, over my hips, down my legs, back up, above, below, around, yet never touching me.

Every nerve in my body is on fire, throbbing with the pleasure that beats in my spine, in my groin, that is leaking from my cock with every slow pass of her fingers, every arch of my spine.

The whole world narrows to her eyes, her mouth, her hands, and my burning pleasure.

The fingers of her right hand finally dip between my legs, whispering along my base, finding the exquisitely sensitive skin behind my balls, her nails scraping explosions through me.

“Fuck, Sam. Please. I can’t,”

I’m incoherent, panting, flying.

“Look at me, Jack.”

And then her lips are on me, surrounding me, taking my length so deep into her mouth, her hand over my heart the only thing keeping me tethered to the earth as I surrender everything to her control.

The room spins into focus around me, settling as slowly as the bliss in my bones.

She scoots up my body, tucks my head into the crook of her neck, rolls me against her with just a hint of pressure from her palm. Her arms surround me, her hands covering the ugliness that scars my back, her lips raining kisses in my hair.

“You’ll always be safe with me,” she whispers. “Always.”

I don’t know whether a minute has passed, or an hour, when she moves and I rise to the surface of my dream. I’m cold where she’s not pressed against me.

Her fingers run through my hair.

“Welcome back,” she smiles.

I blink, groggy.

“How long was I asleep?”

I rub my right hand across my face and a trail of black velvet follows it.

Oops.

“Long enough for me to feel guilty about not even keeping you warm when I promised to keep you safe,” she answers with more tenderness than my heart can bear.

“Jack.” She presses up on one elbow. Her teeth worry at her bottom lip.

“Was that alright?”

I blink both eyes in disbelief.

“Alright?” I motion vaguely in the air. “I… phwoar.”

She grins shyly, picks at the velvet rope still attached to my right wrist.

“I love making you… feel so much. And I can get better.”

My breath rushes out of me in a bark of joy and relief.

“Better? God, Sam, I thought you’d kick me out on my ass for being a freak. That… that was. You’re already _everything.”_

“Well, I can get better at my knots.” She flicks the end of the rope gently against my skin.

I pull her against me, chuckling.

“There’s that, Colonel. Yes. Let’s not put that rope work in your report.”

Her laughter bubbles around us, then peters out.

“Are you sure I’ll be enough for you?”

The hesitancy in her question is so familiar. So gut-wrenchingly familiar. It’s precisely what I felt when I asked her to take control.

I raise her chin until her eyes once again look straight into me. Like they did this morning. Like I want them to do every day for the rest of my life.

“Already,” I say. “And always.”


	29. 9 December: Pork Chop or Chinese

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Um. I … like your … pork …” I peter out. My entire body is humming with the need to touch her, to taste her.
> 
> She caps the marker, sets it down in the cradle at the bottom edge of the board.
> 
> “Pity,” she murmurs, without looking at me.
> 
> \--oOo--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unicorns, short chapters are the new me, because I LOVED reconnecting with you and I don't want to wait too long between chapters.
> 
> Fortunately, Sam is enjoying this as much as I am...
> 
> I love you all.  
> xo
> 
> \--oOo--

*Jack*

My friends at the academy didn’t believe me when I told them how long I waited to lose my virginity, so after the first time, I went along with what they wanted to hear, and lied.

The truth is, I was raised religious, and while I was a man and nobody actually expected me to wait until after marriage, I held on to one belief that stopped me with my first three girlfriends. Stopped me until they grew tired and moved on.

I refused to sleep with someone I could not imagine marrying. Giving _that_ part of myself, asking a woman to do the same in return, was not something I could do with someone I didn’t love.

Of course I didn’t propose to every woman I slept with. For God’s sake, it was the twentieth century. But it meant I waited until I could trust my heart to be willing to stand beside her forever, if that’s what she asked me for the morning after.

So my first time was at twenty two.

And I can count the women I’ve slept with on a single hand.

After the first night, I floated through the world. My military boots were weightless. I hit the bulls eye with every shot at target practice. I was superman, and dreaming of being superman, all in the same breath.

I feel that way again today.

My chest and arms ache from my workout with Teal’c yesterday. The bruises have darkened in a way I haven’t experienced since taking the General’s chair. But I walk on cotton candy, an inch above the floor.

She saw me. And she didn’t mind.

No, more than that. With just one sentence, she reached into the core of my exhausted fear.

I hold the words she spoke in the hollow above my heart. _I beat myself up for weeks about whether I should have left SG-3 to guard the gate on my first command. You make those calls every day. For all of us. For me. I don’t know where you find the strength._

The thing is, I don’t feel strong enough.

Not here, in the corridors I know better than the rooms of my own home.

Not in that godforsaken council chamber in Washington where other generals treated the women and men in their command like chips at a blackjack table.

In the moment, a white heat sears through me, and I do what has to be done.

And then the doubts crowd in.

The only time I ever sleep through the night is with her in my arms. And even then, not always. But having her to hold, brings me the peace of knowing that whatever else I fucked up, I kept her alive.

Last night, after I confessed my terrifying truth, she took me into her care with more understanding than I deserve.

I slept all night, wrapped in her arms.

Slept like a baby.

Stepping on air, glowing with our secret, I grin my way through the day.

It’s 6pm before I know it.

I fight back a smile as I knock on her half-open lab door.

“Carter, do you _never_ stop working?” I feign exasperation when her gentle ‘ _come’_ beckons me in.

She looks up from her computer, and her smile steals my words.

Every smart-assed comment I rehearsed between my office and hers evaporates as she slides off her chair and crosses the space between us, all legs and grace and _Sam._ She passes close enough to me to brush my thigh with her fingers, but moves on to the whiteboard facing the camera in the corner of the room.

I follow, mute, not needing her voice to hear her command.

She comes to rest with her back to the camera, lifting a marker and waiting for me to come to stand next to her, my own face shielded from the video recording.

“I was just thinking about what to make for dinner,” she murmurs, pointing at something with a fraction and the power of 25 with the felt tip of the pen. “How do you feel about pork chops?”

“Uhh…”

I’m still trying to figure out if the power of 25 has anything to do with pork when she speaks again.

“Of course, if you absolutely hate them, that may be fun, in itself,” she says quietly.

I’m not sure my ears heard what my leaping heart just thought I did. Careful not to move so much that I expose my face to the security camera, I pull back my chin to see her expression.

She licks her lips, slowly, deliberately, her smile growing wolfish. She circles the equation while her lips move.

“I mean, if you beg, I’ll order Chinese. But only if you _really_ beg.” Her right hand moves backwards and forwards on the whiteboard as she says the word _really,_ drawing a thick, black line under the letter X.

_Fuck._

I swallow, the sound loud.

“Um. I … like your … pork …” I peter out. My entire body is humming with the need to touch her, to taste her.

She caps the marker, sets it down in the cradle at the bottom edge of the board.

“Pity,” she murmurs, without looking at me.

“Fuck, Carter. Leave me with the ability to walk outta here,” I plead.

The smile she flashes me sparkles in her eyes.

“That was almost good enough to deserve Chinese, sir.”

I have to fold my arms tightly across my chest to stop myself from crushing her to me.

“One condition though.” Hell, I hope I haven’t lost all ability to sound stern around her.

The mischief leaves her eyes. Wide, grey-blue and honest, they turn to me.

“Anything, sir.”

God, I want to kiss her.

“I owe you a gift from the calendar. We open that first, then you decide whether I deserve chops or Chinese.”

She ducks her head over her smile in that way I’ve memorised over years, that way that turns my knees to jello and my soul to fireworks. Her fingertip taps gently against another part of the equation she’s been outlining. On the letter Y.

“That might just work, Sir,” she nods at the board. “That might just be the best idea I’ve heard all day.”


End file.
